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accuratepicuresofanthropologists · 3 years ago

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Alfred Brown, from Stocking’s Functionalism Historicized.

A.R. Radcliffe-Brown is the only anthropologist I know of who had a signature cocktail. He called it the ‘Claire de Lune’: one one-third gin, one-third kirsch, one sixth lemon juice and one sixth orgeat. (Stocking, “Radcliffe-Brown’s receipts: the nomothetic of everyday life, p. 10 in HAN 5(1) 1978.) Radcliffe-Brown’s eccentricity did not stop there. He spent his entire life cultivating the air of the sophisticated bohemian, affecting “a cloak and opera-hat on inappropriate occasions” (Kuper Anthro and Anthros 1st ed. 41). He “had even thought out the best position in which to sleep,” recounted one admirer, “Not on the back, not whole on the side, and not like a foetus.” (Watson, But to what purpose, p. 63).

'Cultivated’ is the right word for it. He was born Alfred Brown, ‘A.R. Radcliffe-Brown’ being the hyphenated personality he concocted over the course of his life. There were “so many other Browns in the world” (Stocking After Tylor, 304) he remarked, that it seemed only fair to change his name. Most people called him R-B, while his friends called him ‘Rex’. The larger than life mystique he developed for himself was half English aristocrat and half Paris savant and definitely a conscious project of self-creation.

In fact, Alfred Brown was born in 1881 “of undistinguished Warwickshire stock” (Stocking, After Tylor 304). His father died when he was five, leaving his family penniless. R-B lived with his grandparents and soon found success through study, earning a scholarship to Cambridge in 1901, where he was first exposed to anthropology. In 1898 the university had sent a large, interdisciplinary team of researchers to the Torres Straits, the narrow body of water separating Australia and New Guinea. Very little was known of the area at the time, and Torres Straits expedition, as it was known, investigated both sides of the straits, using what were then the latest techniques in the new fields of anthropology, psychology, and linguistics. The main members of the team for our purposes here were W.H.R. Rivers, A.C. Haddon, and C.G. Seligman. Seligman would move on to the LSE and be a teacher of Malinowski, but the others continued their association with Cambridge, forming a ‘Cambridge School’ of anthropology. This was the version of the discipline that Radcliffe-Brown would encounter in his student days.

Brown earned his degree at Cambridge in 1904 and obtained another Cambridge-sponsored grant to conduct research in the Andamans, an isolated chain of islands between what is now Myanmar and India. The islands were seen by the British as one of the many last bastions of unexplored primitivity they could explore, featuring in the popular 1890 Sherlock Holmes story The Sign of the Four. For most of the 19th century the British used it as a harbor for ships moving between India and Burma (then both under British control) and as a prison. When Radcliffe-Brown visited the island its “negrito” were seen as the lowest form of life in Asia, perhaps possibly related to African pygmys. Today, the evidence suggests they are genetically related to Malaysian people and strongly resisted British forces, who ‘pacified’ the region violently and used its prison to isolate and incarcerate Indian activists striving for independence.

It turns out Radcliffe-Brown was not much of a fieldworker. Although he describes himself as having spent the years 1906 to 1908 in the Andamans, most of his actual fieldwork involved ten months of research at Fort Blair, the British military outpost, where he interviewed nearby Andamanese in an attempt to reconstruct their ‘primitive’ social organization as it existed before the arrival of the British. He gave up working in the other, less colonized islands because it would have involved spending years learning the language. “I ask for the word ‘arm’ and get the Önge for ‘you are pinching me’,” he wrote. [this from Stocking, After Tylor 306-307].

In 1908 he returned to Cambridge. His fieldwork was only a partial success, but he had done it, and he won a fellowship at Trinity. He spent the next several years lecturing in England at the LSE, Birmingham, Cambridge, and other places. It was during this period that Radcliffe-Brown undertook another bout of research between 1908 and 1910, this time in Australia. Australia was seen as a particularly good place to do research because Aboriginal people were viewed as especially primitive remainders of human nature in the raw. Radcliffe-Brown’s expedition again got mixed results. He was paired with Daisy Bates, a now-famous female explorer, but they quarreled. Radcliffe-Brown got a sense of Australian colonialism when a ceremony was broken up by white settlers seeking to arrest Aboriginal people. Radcliffe-Brown ended up hiding them in his tent.

During his lectureships in England from the period of 1910 to 1914 Radcliffe-Brown continued to shape his own views. His Francophilia grew, as he discovered the work of Emile Durkheim and, especially, Marcel Mauss. Mauss corresponded with Radcliffe-Brown and Radcliffe-Brown began to see Durkheimian sociology as a novel and powerful theoretical form that could be applied to the nascent theories of ‘primitive’ social organization developed by Rivers. In 1914 he hyphenated his named, becoming finally A.R. Radcliffe-Brown.

R-B in Australia in 1928

In 1914 he attended the same conference in Australia as Malinowski, and like Malinowski he found himself stranded without funds when World War I broke out. Too old to enroll in the war (he was in his early thirties when it began) or get back home, and out of money, he took up a job at a grammar school in Sydney and eventually got a position as Director of Education for Tonga [After Tylor 324]. He tried mixing in a bit of fieldwork but was again frustrated by the need to learn a local language and spend a significant amount of time in the field. After the war, in 1919, he contracted tuberculosis and went to go live with his brother in South Africa.

In 1921(?) Radcliffe-Brown was appointed to the inaugural chair in anthropology at the University of Cape Town. He was not an active fieldworker in Africa, but used teaching as an opportunity to develop his own theories of social organization. These were most clearly on display in his 1922 book Andaman Islanders, in which he took ethnography from his earlier fieldwork and analyzed it using the framework he had learned from Mauss and Durkheim. But R-B became best known not for his book but for his essays, written versions of his lectures in which he expounded his systems of thought with great clarity. He used these essays to break with historicism, which he associated not with a scrupulous Boas particularism, but with a conjectural history which explained ‘primitive’ societies in terms of survivals.

How did Radcliffe-Brown envision the relationship between politics and the academy while in South Africa? Importantly, he looked at South Africa in a politically progressive way as a single society composed of different groups, rather than two different ‘cultures’ or ‘races’ meeting. This latter position was politically conservative in the South African context and played into apartheid discourses of the necessity of separate spheres for black and white, and ‘preserving’ African culture by denying Africans western education and restricting them to ‘tribal’ territories. That said, Radcliffe-Brown was hardly an activist. He believed in pursuing anthropology as a pure science - what we might call today ‘basic research’ — and did not believe it should be sullied with applied work, despite the fact that it offered, he claimed, objective truths about the social situation which administrators and politicians did not have access to. Rather, he used anthropology’s Pure Scientific Knowledge to criticize government policy which was uninformed by his insights. This stance was offered both relevance but also distance, and is a position which many anthropologists have taken from the safety of their ivory towers.

After five years at Cape Town, Radcliffe-Brown took up another inaugural chair in anthropology (support for which came from Orme Masson, an influential Australian professor and also Malinowski’s father-in-law), this one at the University of Sydney. Being at Sydney gave Radcliffe-Brown the ability to influence who was doing fieldwork not only in Australia, but in much of the southwest Pacific, including New Guinea. The position was supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, whose sought to provide training in anthropology to colonial officers serving in New Guinea and elsewhere in the Pacific. The results were mixed. Radcliffe-Brown’s structure functionalism was inherently conservative: since every institution in a society had a function, any change to the structure would be pathological. This was not the news that colonial authorities wanted to hear, since their goal was to change the societies they encountered, both for humanitarian reasons and for profit.

R-B around 1930, via an earlier tumblr post.

In 1931 Radcliffe-Brown moved again — this time to the University of Chicago. Chicago was the first place where he had taught in which he was not creating an anthropology program from scratch. Indeed, it was the first country in which there was already a well-developed and active program of anthropological research. As we have seen, in the pre-professonial days, anthropology was dominated by east coast departments such as Harvard, Yale, Penn, and Columbia, each of which were centers of intellectual life for each state they were in, and attached to a museum. Chicago was an upstart, the major academic power in the American midwest, and richly funded by Rockefeller money when it opened in 1890. The older, east coast departments emerged out of an English tradition derived ultimately from Oxbridge. Chicago was designed as a pure research university in the German tradition — ‘the college’, as it was called, was tacked on to the ‘university’ which granted higher degrees. Anthropology’s foothold at Chicago was established by Frederick Starr, one of the most ultra-creepy and deeply racist anthropologists I’ve run across. He was replaced in 1924 by Faye Cooper Cole, a Boasian who was an able administrator whose goal was to build up the department by importing talent. He first hired Edward Sapir, the best Boasian available given that Kroeber was at Berkeley. In 1929 anthropology became a separate department from sociology. In 1931,When Sapir left, Cole looked for his next star and found Radcliffe-Brown.

Radcliffe-Brown helped put his unique spin on Chicago, a place which in its midwest isolation was already developing its own unique style. Radcliffe-Brown’s ahistorical ‘functionalism’ was different, he claimed, than the ‘historical’ school of the Boasians. He developed the study of North American kinship systems — which ended up being far more complicated than he had thought — and produced a generation of students who, along with Sapir-trained Robert Redfield and R-B’s old friend and student W. Lloyd Warner, would shape the department in the future.

Perhaps this is a good place to mention Radcliffe-Brown as a mentor. His global peregrinations prevented him from creating a circle of dedicated students the way Mauss, Boas, and Malinowski did. This lack of a Radcliffe-Brown ‘school’ was not just the result of his travels, but also seemed deeply ties to his character. By his time in Chicago in the 1930s, Alfred Brown had transformed himself into A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, a glittering Svengali of anthropology. He appears not to have had much of a private life, and was married and divorced early in his life. He did not have messy love-hate relationships full of intense and ambivalent relationships with his students as Malinowski did, nor was he a family man the way Boas was. He cultivated awed disciplines who adhered unquestioningly to his beautiful theories. Most of his career focused on teaching undergraduates, and his speciality was the lecture. As someone once remarked (Gluckman iirc), he has trouble teaching graduate students because he had already taught them his entire system at the lecture. At Chicago he had students he worked closely with, such as Fred Eggan, but he did not found a school. Rather, he was one more influence in a rich mix of intellectual currents. [drawing on Stocking’s chapters in After Tylor]

An elderly R-B, probably from his Oxford days, via the Pitt-Rivers.

Radcliffe-Brown’s day finally arrived in 1936. R.R. Marett, the reader of anthropology at Oxford, was going to retire, so All Souls (a wealthy college) agreed to food the bill for a professorship in anthropology, mostly, apparently, to avoid being taxed by the university during the depression, when wealthy and ancient colleges like All Souls maintained embarrassingly plush balance sheets. at a time when others struggled. Malinowski was first offered the position, but was happy in London, and Radcliffe-Brown was selected to fill the position [drawn from ch. 3 and 4 of Riveiere’s Oxford Anthropology]. This was an important turning point for anthropology in the UK — for the first time, the ‘functional revolution’ had a firm hold at Oxbridge.

Malinowski was Radcliffe-Brown’s frenemy, united with him against the older anthropology but sparring for funds to create the new anthropology. In the 1930s they had jousted for control of Rockefeller money, and students moved in and out of their orbits. Malinowski’s massive two volume 1934 ethnography Coral Gardens and Their Magic set new records for empirical detail but seemed to offer little in terms of the new objective Science of Man that Malinowski promised his funders (“I know a lot about yam growing after reading it, I can tell you,” Quipped Godfrey Wilson [Fires Beneath loc 2093]. Radcliffe-Brown, on the other hand, had a genuine theoretical system. For the more discerning English anthropologists, such as E.E. Evans-Pritchard, he offered a much more British and drama-free environment than Malinowski. Friday pub nights with Max Gluckman, Evans-Pritchard, and Meyer Fortes helped endear Radcliffe-Brown and his social systems to some of the most up and coming anthropologists of the next generation [Riviere, Oxford Anthropology, p. 90]. In an unusual twist of fate Malinowski left for America on a speaking tour in 1938, only to be stranded there by the outbreak of World War II. He would never return. Oxford was now the center for the new anthropology.

R-B did not impress Oxford as he had Capetown and Sydney. His larger-than-life bohemian personality seemed pushy and arriviste in an institution which had valued conformity and tradition for literally a thousand years. Marett had advocated for what we might call a “four-field” approach in anthropology, including physical anthropology and archaeology, with a focus on museum collections (in this case, the Pitt-Rivers museum). Oxford, like Cambridge, was still focused on undergraduate teaching. Radcliffe-Brown, drawing on Malinowski’s success at the LSE, tried to transform Oxford into a center for graduate education. But the LSE was a new institution, with strong top-down leadership (whose ear Malinowski had) and a willingness to innovate. Radcliffe-Brown was unable to move conservative Oxford, and his innovations were seen by the existing community of anthropologists as a threat, ‘disaster’ as Beatrice Blackwood called it. His various attempts to get external funding, or move internal college and university funding were also unsuccessful. He requested that the anthropology department be turned into an ‘institute’, a request which the university did not approve. He simply changed the name on the door and printed new business cards! Eventually, the change was accepted. The depression no doubt didn’t help but neither, likely, did his personality — he lacked the tact and charm of Firth and Malinowski. [Mills in History of Oxford Anthropology].

The elderliest R-B, from his Oceania obituary.

Worse, World War II altered British national priorities in important and unforeseen ways. Radcliffe-Brown was 55 when he was hired at Oxford — just in time to watch students empty out of the university and into the military. He eventually left as well, spending the second half of the war in Brazil, trying to start an anthropology program in Sao Paolo. When the war was over so was his career: He retired in 1946 at the age of 65 (the standard year of retirement). During the war he had dreamed of returning to the United States, but bounced around in Egypt and South Africa (partially seeking drier warmer climates since, as he told Warner, he could not live in Britain in the winter any more) before settling in London. He died in 1955.

#Oceania (journal)#Functionalism Historicized (book)#A.R. Radcliffe-Brown #anthropology #portrait #pitt-rivers museum #W Lloyd Warner (book)

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armthearmour · 3 years ago

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Review: The Armoury of the Castle Churburg

The 1996 publication of The Armoury of the Castle Churburg by Mario Scalini is a rewritten and revised version of a catalog written by Oswald von Trapp in 1929. This single volume contains Scalini’s work written in Italian, German, and English, and presents a brief history of the Churburg armory before examining the pieces it contained. In writing this work, Scalini hoped to update the information set out by Oswald von Trapp almost 70 years prior, including newer scholarship and comparing the pieces contained within Churburg to newly discovered pieces in other collections to provide more precise and up-to-date information.

In discussing the history of the castle, Scalini calls the von Trapp collection the “most important non-royal, dynastic collection of European armor” [20]. The collection of arms and armor housed at Castle Churburg is certainly impressive, the castle contains almost four hundred distinct artifacts, many of which are extremely rare survivals from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Scalini also defines a number of terms which he uses to describe armor later in the book. Reconstructions and repairs he defines as:

interventions carried out at the time the armor was in use, to restore the original function of any assembly of metal plates, done with the primary intention of restoring to efficiency an object intended for practical use. Reconstructions imply the substitution of a part, repairs imply its mending.

Completions are defined as “adjustments which, carried out when interest in the object was somewhat historicized, … tended to restore the object to aesthetic integrity, freely altering the forms dictated by its original functional requirements.” Compositions or recompositions are described as:

operations, frequent during both the active life of a piece and during its time as a collector’s piece, which also strive for aesthetic or symbolic results but which limit themselves to mixing parts structurally but not chronologically compatible, pieces of similar provenance but originally belonging to distinct ensembles.

Finally restorations are characterized as “interventions intended to recover the primary structure of the object, without the sorts of partial completions sometimes resorted to for motives of conservation.” These terms are extremely important to understanding the descriptions of the Churburg armors set out in later chapters.

The book is then divided into nine chapters. These chapters are entitled “Pre-Renaissance Defensive Armor,” “Fifteenth-century Italian Armour at Churburg,” “Austrian and German Armourers’ Work of the Gothic Period,” “Transitional and ‘Maximilian’ Armour,” “Garnitures and Knightly Armour of the High Renaissance and Later,” “Light Armour of the Late Renaissance,” “Single Pieces of Defensive Armour and Saddlery of the Late Sixteenth Century,” “The ‘Textile’ Protections and Various Other Items in the Armoury,” and “The Offensive Weapons-Swords, Cross-bows, Firearms.” Scalini states that this is the same structure followed in the 1929 catalog.

Each chapter follows essentially the same structure. The objects from the collection which fall under the chapter’s topic are each given a physical description, including important aspects such as maker’s marks, and are then compared to similar pieces from other collections, and occasionally to artworks as well. Using these comparisons, Scalini then estimates the date and place of production for the piece, noting where he agrees and disagrees with Oswald von Trapp’s 1929 estimates. Finally, a discussion on the provenance of the object is provided, including both documented and probable accounts of how the object ended up in the von Trapp collection. Each chapter includes endnotes and images of the relevant objects both from Churburg and those to which Scalini refers compares the Churburg objects.

After a brief conclusion, the work also includes thirty pages of colored images of select pieces from the collection and a full catalog of object numbers which are followed by images of every piece in the collection. The object numbers of the pieces in the Chuburg collection have been updated since the 1929 catalog, so Scalini also provides a helpful key which shows the old object numbers alongside the new ones. Finally a bibliography and an index are included.

The main primary sources Scalini utilizes for this work are the artworks and surviving pieces of arms and armor mentioned previously, however, Scalini does also refer to several inventories of the Churburg armory taken throughout the 16th century. The author draws upon a rather rich list of secondary sources, which are listed in the bibliography, and include English, German, Italian, and French scholarship.

The only concerns this reviewer has with Scalini’s work are issues of organization. The fact that this work is offered in three different languages is wonderful, however, releasing each of these translations separately in their own volumes would save the reader flipping through a great number of useless pages to find the next section in their chosen language. Additionally, while images of the artifacts are invaluable, their place at the end of the chapter is somewhat inconvenient, forcing the reader to flip back and forth between the description and the image. This reviewer appreciates that including images in the main body of text can be troublesome from an editorial point of view, so perhaps including the images prior to the commentary would at least allow the reader to acquaint themselves with what is being discussed first.

Despite these critiques, this book remains an incredible resource to all students of arms and armor. As the author stated, the Churburg collection is one of the most important collections in the world, filled with unique and rare pieces with phenomenal provenance. A familiarity with the terms of arms and armor is necessary as Scalini discusses many pieces using technical terms without providing any sort of definition, a practice which will likely confuse anyone new to the study of arms and armor. However this reviewer firmly believes that anyone with an interest in late medieval and renaissance arms and armor should read The Armoury of the Castle Chuburg.

#book review #history #long post #the armoury of the castle churburg #armor #weapons #medieval #middle ages

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niccage · 3 years ago

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Ok Miami Beach lighthouse one was my favorite because it serviced both cars and boats AND the lighthouse itself was functional AND a little fisherman’s radio was broadcasted out of the top AND it had a hotel and restaurant AND it streamlined traditional lighthouse/oceanliner designs (PORTHOLE WINDOWS) so that it aligned with not only miami’s famous art deco style but the popular Nautical Moderne style as well AND YET STILL it can definitely be considered a very early example of International Style architecture in the US with its lack of historicizing ornamentation its stark white walls its ribbon windows and its use of cantilever construction AND Y E T S T I L L we can still see the Miami Mediterranean Revival influences in the loggia A N D Y E T we have like three pictures of this place MAX and you can find like two lines about it in just one fucking book and it just dismisses it as whimsical example of Fantastic architecture. This shit is the fucking Villa Savoye of commercial architecture and nobody ever cared enough to take a few good pics. Kills me every time.

Edit: i went back and looked through the old paper and i was wrong. One photo and one postcard. But wasn’t she beautiful.

#oh to have eaten dinner at the polevitzky and russell miami beach gulf lighthouse service station #too bad they tore her tf down

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redantsunderneath · 4 years ago

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On Analysis Part 1 - Hermeneutics and Configurative reading (the “what” part)

“Without turning, the pharmacist answered that he liked books like The Metamorphosis, Bartleby, A Simple Heart, A Christmas Carol. And then he said that he was reading Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's. Leaving aside the fact that A Simple Heart and A Christmas Carol were stories, not books, there was something revelatory about the taste of this bookish young pharmacist, who ... clearly and inarguably preferred minor works to major ones. He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pecouchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze a path into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.” ― Roberto Bolano, 2666

Much of the background for this post in particular comes from Paul Fry’s Yale lecture course about the theory of literature. This is a great starting course for interpretation and textual analysis and, yes, film and TV shows are text.

In futzing around with this stuff, what am I doing? Less charitably, what do I think I’m even trying to do, here? Many feel that applying theory to art and entertainment is as pretentious as the kind of art or entertainment that encourages it. It’s understandable. Many examples of analysis are garbage and even people capable of good work get going in the wrong direction due to fixations or prejudices they aren’t even aware of and get swept away by the mudslide of enthusiasm into the pit of overreach. That’s part of the process. But this stuff has an actual philosophical grounding, so let’s start by looking at the stories history of trying to figure out “texts.”

Ideas about the purpose of art, what it means to be an author, and how it is best to create go back to the beginning of philosophy but (outside of some notable examples) there is precious little consideration of the reception of art and certainly not a feeling that it was a legitimate field of study until more recently. The Greeks figured the mind would just know how to grok it because what it was getting at was automatically universal and understanding was effortless to the tune mind. But the idea that textual analysis should be taken seriously began with the literal texts of the Torah (Rabbinical scholarship) and then the Bible, but mostly in closed circles.

Hermeneutics as we know it began as a discipline with the Protestant Reformation since the Bible was now available to be read. Sooooo, have you read it? It’s not the most obvious or coherent text. Reading it makes several things clear about it: 1. It is messy and self contradictory; 2. A literal reading is not possible for an honest mind and isn’t advisable in any event; 3. It is extremely powerful and mysterious in a way that makes you want to understand, your reach exceeding your grasp. This is like what I wrote about Inland Empire - it captures something in a messy, unresolvable package that probably can’t be contained in something clear and smooth. This interpretive science spread to law and philosophy for reasons similar to it’s roots in text based religion - there was an imperative to understand what was meant by words.

Hans-Georg Gadamer is the first to explicitly bring to bear a theory of how we approach works. He was a student of Martin Heidegger, who saw the engagement with “the thing itself” as a cyclic process that was constructive of meaning, where we strive to learn from encounters and use that to inform our next encounter. Gadamer applied this specifically to how we read a text (for him, this means philosophical text) and process it. Specifically he strove to, by virtue of repeated reading and rumination which is informed by prior readings (on large and small scales, even going back and forth in a sentence), “align the horizons” of the author and the reader. The goal of this process is to arrive at (external to the text) truth, which was for him the goal of the enterprise of writing and reading to begin with. This is necessary because the author and reader both carry different preconceptions to the enterprise (really all material and cultural influences on thinking) that must be resolved.

ED Hirsch had a lifelong feud with Gadamer over this, whipping out Emanuel Kant to deny that his method was ethically sound. He believed that to engage in this activity otherizes and instrumentalizes the author and robs them of them being a person saying something that has their meaning, whether it is true or false. We need to get what they are laying down so we can judge the ideas as to whether they are correct or not. It may be this is because he wasn’t that sympathetic a reader - he’s kind of a piece of work - and maybe his thheory was an excuse to act like John McLaughlin. He goes on to have a hell of a career fucking up the US school system

But it’s Wolfgang Iser that comes in with the one neat trick which removes (or at least makes irrelevant) the knowability problem, circumvents the otherizing problem, and makes everything applicable to any text (e.g. art, literature) by bringing in phenomenology, specifically Edmund Husserl’s “constitution” of the world by consciousness. It makes perfect sense to bring phenomenology into interpretive theory as phenomenology had a head start as a field and is concerned with something homologous - we only have access to our experience of <the world/the text> and need to grapple with how we derive <reality/meaning> from it. Husserl said we constitute reality from the world using our sensory/cognitive apparatus, influenced by many contingencies (experiential, cultural, sensorial, etc) but that’s what reality is and It doesn’t exist to us unbracketed. Iser said we configure meaning from the text using our sensory/cognitive apparatus, influenced by many contingencies (experiential, cultural, sensorial, etc) but that’s what meaning is and It doesn’t exist to us unbracketed. Reality and meaning are constructed on these contingencies, and intersubjective agreement is not assured.

To Iser, we create a virtual space (his phrase) where we operate processes on the text to generate a model what the text is saying, and this process has many inputs based on our dataset external to the text (not all of which is good data) as well as built in filters and mapping legends based on our deeper preconceptions (which may be misconceptions or “good enough” approximations). Most if this goes on without any effort whatsoever, like the identification of a dog on the street. But some of it is a learned process - watch an adult who has never read comics try to read one. These inputs, filters, and routers can animate an idea of the author in the construct, informing our understanding based on all sorts of data we happen to know and assumptions about how certain things work.

This is reader response theory, that meaning is generated in the mind by interaction with the text and not by the text, though Stanley Fish didn’t accent the “in the mind part” and name the phenomenon until years later. Note that Gadamer is largely prescriptive and Hirsch is entirely prescriptive while Iser is predominantly descriptive. He’s saying “this is how you were doing it all along,” but by being aware of the process, we can gain function.

For those keeping score: 1. Gadamer, after Heidegger’s cyclic process at constructing an understanding of the thing itself, centers on a point between the author and reader and prioritizes universal truth. 2. Hirsch, after Kant’s ethical stand on non instrumentalization, centers on hearing what the author is saying and prioritizes the judging the ideas. 3. Iser, after Husserl’s constituted reality, centers on configuring a multi-input sense of the text within a virtual (mental) space and prioritizes meaning.

Everything after basically comes out of Iser and is mostly restatement with focusing/excluding of elements. The 20th century mindset, from the logical positivists to Bohr’s view that looking for reality underlying the wave form was pointless, had a serious case of God (real meaning, ground reality) is dead. W.K. Wimsatt and M. C. Beardsley’s intentional fallacy, an attempt to caution interpreters to steer clear of considering what the god-author meant, begat death of the author which attempted to take the author entirely out of the equation - it was less likely you’d ever understand the if you focused on that! To me, this is corrective to trends at the time and not good praxis - it excludes natural patterns of reading in which the author is configured, rejects potentially pertinent data, and limits some things one can get out of the text.

Meanwhile formalism/new criticism (these will be discussed later in a how section) focused on just what was going on in the text with as few inputs as possible, psychoanalytics and historicism looked to interrogate the inputs/filters to the sense making process, postmodernism/deconstruction attacked those inputs/filters making process questioning whether meaning was not just contingent but a complete illusion, and critical studies became obsessed with specific strands of oppression and hegemony as foundational filters that screw up the inputs. But the general Iser model seems to be the grandfather of everything after.

Reader intersubjectivity is an area of concern. In the best world, the creation of art is in part an attempt to find the universal within the specific, something that resonates and speaks to people. A very formative series of David Milch lectures (to me at least) proffer that if you find a scene, idea, whatever, that is very compelling to you, your job is to figure out what in it is “fanciful” (an association specific to you) and how to find and bring out the universal elements. But people’s experiences are different and there be many ideas of what a piece of art means without there being a dominant one. So the building of models within each mind leaves a lot to consider as the final filtered input is never quite the same. There is a lot of hair on this dog (genres engender text expectations that an author can subvert by confusing the filter, conflicting input can serve a purpose, the form of a guided experience can be a kind of meaning, on and on ad nauseum)

The ultimate question, you might ask, is why we need to do this at all. I mean, I understood Snow White perfectly fine as a kid. There’s no “gap” that needs to be leaped. The meaning of the movie is evident enough on some level without vivisecting it. The Long answer to what we gain from looking under Snow’s skirt is the next episode. The short is: 1. You are doing it anyway. That Snow White thing, you were doing thhat to Snow White you just weren’t conscious of the process.

2. It’s fun. The process only puts a tool of enjoyment in your arsenal. You don’t have to use it all the time.

3. You’ll see stuff you like in new ways. The way Star Wars works is really interesting!

4. It may give dimensions to movies that are flawed or bad, and you might wind up liking them. Again, more to love.

5. It is sometimes necessary to get to a full (or any) appreciation of some complicated works as the most frustrating and resistant stuff to engage with is sometimes the most incredible.

6. It reinforces your involvement in something you like. It makes you more connected and more hungry, like any good exercise.

7. You can become more aware of what those preconceptions and biases are, which might give you insights in other areas of your life.

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thelonguepuree · 3 years ago

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The tension between the sheer interest of difference and the representative function exposes what is most problematic in Buurma and Heffernan’s history of the discipline, a surprising reduction of this history to one of sameness and indifference, a history without history. In The Teaching Archive’s history of literary study, trends, movements, schools, and revolutions are, in the end, illusions. Some differences disappear altogether, as with the political differences between [TS] Eliot and [IA] Richards, or [Cleanth] Brooks and [Edmund] Wilson. The discipline was always much as it is today. The spectacular revisionism of this history will no doubt captivate readers who are weary of conflict, because it is difference that gives rise to conflict. But I don’t believe that the remedy for this weariness is to make the discipline’s history of conflict disappear. It may be true that on the ground of teaching, in the classroom, where the perspective is here and now, where the horizon is tomorrow’s class, the longer history of methodological conflict is not so urgent a concern. But this history is not an illusion. In Buurma and Heffernan’s account of the discipline, the division between critic and scholar, between teaching and scholarship, between formalism and historicism — and all other possible antagonisms — cease to animate conflict: This book rejects the idea that our discipline has been pulled in two directions, that its core has been formed by controversy over method or that its goals of producing knowledge about literature and appreciating literature have been mutually exclusive. Formalism and historicism, we argue, are convenient abstractions from a world of practice in which those methods rarely oppose one another. I would agree that this statement is true in the classroom, that good teaching is not just partisan polemic. But I would also say that a conflict such as that between formalism and historicism is not just a matter of abstraction, that something needs to be argued here in theory, and that there are stakes in the weighting of these scales. A similar reservation applies to Buurma and Heffernan’s repudiation of the received history of the discipline. In that history, there are two major moments of crisis, with subsequent periods of resolution and unwinding: the first saw the emergence of the discipline proper, with Practical Criticism and New Criticism. The second saw the unwinding of that disciplinary formation with the assimilation of Continental theory and the impact of the New Social Movements on literary study. Here again, Buurma and Heffernan want to argue that there is nothing but the illusion of change: “‘[I]dentity politics’ has flourished in all eras.” And: “Far from being a post-’68 phenomenon, ideology critique — Marxist and otherwise — threads through literature classrooms across the entire twentieth century.” It is true that the work of J. Saunders Redding precedes the African American studies programs of the post-’60s; and it is true that there were Marxists like Edmund Wilson before Fredric Jameson. But something did happen in the ’60s that transformed the discipline of literary study, along with the university and the nation. Buurma and Heffernan don’t deny this, but want to direct our attention elsewhere: “[A] disciplinary historical focus on practice rather than theory reveals interconnections rather than oppositions and continuities rather than ruptures.” At this fork in the road, I worry that Buurma and Heffernan are giving us a choice that we don’t need to make, and which they don’t need to make. This is the choice between conflict and collaboration. We need both in order to account for the history of the discipline, a conclusion that I draw with the help of The Teaching Archive itself, its vivid portraits of teacher-scholars, both their differences and what they have in common. If the literary professoriate has sometimes forgotten what happens in the classroom, it is the great contribution of this book to remind us that without collaboration, there is no teaching, and that without teaching, the discipline has no history.

John Guillory, “‘Flipping’ the History of Literary Studies,” (review of Heffernan and Buurma’s The Teaching Archive) in LARB (x)

#john guillory #rachel sagner buurma #laura heffernan #the teaching archive #book reviews #literary history #literary pedagogy

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22drunkb · 6 years ago

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Some thoughts about Bran Stark

Okay, so--not to butt in and trample around, as someone who never read the books and stopped watching the show sometime around season 3--but the thing is, I feel like the ending has finally allowed me to understand exactly what it was that turned me off Game of Thrones, which I never quite did put my finger on till now, and I want to at least write it out once. (Ironically, this has made me like the story better, though not its execution.) To attempt a spoiler-free summary: I’m going to be thinking about the thematic structure of the story and why that should make certain things make sense, and how they came to not make sense anyway.

The thing is, thematically and structurally, Bran ending up king makes absolute and perfect sense. It’s just that they didn’t write the story in line with the structure they were given. The problem with the show is--and always has been--that the writers don’t actually understand what “subverting fantasy tropes” means or could look like, and they don’t care about it in any meaningful way. What they care about is doing big, bloodthirsty, quasi-historical fiction with a lot of nudity. (See: the Civil War show they wanted to do.) And Bran’s whole situation only makes sense (or would have made sense, if executed properly) in the context of high fantasy.

Keeping in mind that complicating high fantasy tropes was an important part of what Martin reportedly set out to do, each of the Stark kids (the story’s backbone) had a clear thematic purpose. Each of them a) was a take on a trope, b) had a clear character trajectory that would allow that take on the trope to be developed while functioning as a working character arc, and c) through that trope-inflected arc, could allow the audience a window into specific part of the society (i.e., they supported the worldbuilding), which in turn allowed the further development of these takes on the tropes by giving them specific, appropriate settings and side characters to bounce off of. This is to say that GRRM did a good job setting himself up to do “trope subversion” in a way that would comment on the things he wanted to comment on, function as part of a larger world and story, and help support a plot that would be in harmony with all of the above. This is one very solid approach to character design. To be clear, despite this paragraph being about characters, I’m talking about themes--it has nothing to do with their personalities or whatever. This is about what ideas come together in the concept of each character and therefore how each character’s story develops the ideas.

A good reason to approach character design in this way is if you have set out to subvert, complicate, comment on, or otherwise mess with genre tropes. To do so, the characters have to themselves be tropes, or at least be designed in close relation to tropes, in order to derange them. So like, just to take the simplest two examples:

Robb: The Prince. Firstborn, shining favorite, destined to inherit. Set up (normally) to avenge his father, restore order to his kingdom, and go home. Bungles it entirely by seeking true love; meanwhile, in the course of his story we learn about the regional politics of the North, the politics of alliances by marriage and kinship, etc. Narratively, his failure allows the entire political and military situation to get infinitely more clusterfucked. All of those pieces fit together well thematically.

What is being subverted here is the prince’s marital destiny. We have loads of fairy and fantasy stories about prince and prince-types for whom pursuing true love just happens to be convenient (they can marry whoever they want), or whose pursuits of love are rescued by fate (his true love turns out to be his promised princess all along! She’s secretly a magical being of some sort, and that trumps betrothal agreements! The one he was originally supposed to marry died or decided to marry someone else! etc). This is totally kosher in traditional high fantasy (or in the folklore that the genre draws on) because it’s an expression of the harmony of the story-world; the characters go through their trials and adventures and end with a resolution in the form of marriage that announces that all is as it should be. What it looks like GRRM set out to do is ask what happens when people still follow those rules and the rules aren’t in harmony with the world they live in.

In particular, the entire thing points square at the fact that princes are political animals. It seems to me that Robb’s story was meant to say, well, actually, sometimes people with power just have to marry people they don’t love as a condition of being powerful (which comes up constantly throughout the whole show). After Ned and Catlyn, basically every “true love” couple is dysfunctional, incestuous (Cersei and Jaime, Daenerys and John), and/or gets narratively stomped on, as far as I’m aware. (Did Sam and Gilly make it? If so, I think that’s allowed because they’re commoners.) Ironically, Ned and Catlyn set Robb up to fuck up by modeling one of these convenient political-and-true-love marriages. He thought he was supposed to be allowed to have it all. He was wrong. The end. Next. But the show seemed to expect me to feel that the outcome was unjust and tragique for Their Love, when all that was unjust and tragique about it was that Robb was idiot enough to bring the consequences of his actions on his entire group of followers. That is the point. That his status has to constrain his behavior, and when it doesn’t it has consequences for others. The status itself is what’s being problematized.

Jon: The Secret Heir. Second-oldest, bastard-born, treated with contempt. In relation to the family, literally a supplementary person. Set up (normally) to be rediscovered as the true heir to the throne and end up as king (moving from the margins to the center; getting the acceptance he couldn’t have as a bastard). The twist is the “true” dynasty he represents is composed of inbred lunatics, and his potential access to the throne goes not only via that bloodline but via repeating their tradition of incest. Dovetailing nicely with that, he was set up from the start as less wanting access to the kinship system than wanting to be free of it, so instead of becoming king by virtue of being a Targaryen, he stops the reinstatement of the Targaryen line altogether. Meanwhile, for most of his story, as a “supplementary person” he gives the audience a view into a lot of corners of Westeros that are concerned with what is excluded from Westeros: the Night’s Watch, the Wildlings, and indeed the White Walkers.

Again, all of that lines up together well. It’s part of the larger derailment of the blood-as-destiny notion of a “true” king, heir, ruling dynasty, etc. (I think the main reason GRRM goes so hard on the incest, not to mention having not one but THREE bastard characters, is in service of this; it also means Jon’s character arc of wanting out of the bloodline system fits into the thematic structure. See? Everything ties together neatly.) But I mean. We all know the character was not executed well.

And so on. I could do the same for Sansa and all the rest of them. (Sansa and Arya are probably the two most successful executions of what their character designs set them up to do; it’s not a coincidence those are the characters whose stories people seem to be happiest with.) But the thing is, a lot of these tropes, while certainly common in high fantasy, are also found in lots of other genres. Chosen Ones and Unexpectedly Eligible Chosen Ones and Princesses and Warrior Maidens (whether in literal forms or not) show up all over the place. The fact that these aren’t strictly fantasy archetypes perhaps means they were less prone to being mishandled. Bran, though. Bran belongs firmly and only in high fantasy. He is, literally, supposed to be a magic priest-king. A take on the Fisher King, even (I’ll explain about that later). And his story was weighted toward the end because of what it seems like Martin was trying to do more broadly, meaning it was much more on the showrunners to do it right.

High fantasy is always trying in some way to engage with ~the numinous~, which is to say the sort of never-explainable mystery and magic of the world. Magic in high fantasy is usually closely tied to deep time, the land, nature, or the metaphysical. Ancient beings, lost secrets, nature spirits, hidden realms, that sort of thing. It’s part of the genre’s inheritance from the mythology and folklore it’s all based on, which had a much more enchanted, vitalist view of the world than we generally do now. (In a way, that’s the purpose for high fantasy’s existence as a modern genre--keeping some access to that.) What Martin set the whole story up to do was question the tropes that often go along with the genre by making the setting one in which almost everybody has forgotten about all the magic and mystical knowledge that is in their history. Westeros is an extreme, historicized take on the Shire, basically. (”English pastoralism you say? I’ll see you and raise you the English Civil War” -- George R.R. Martin, presumably.) They have no notion of what’s really out there and what’s really possible in the world, and have quite comfortably isolated themselves in a situation where they need not remember. As a result, the social institutions that were developed long ago in relation to the ancient magics and knowledges become, instead, just social norms that can be manipulated, distorted, and played out in a much more historical-fiction kind of fashion, which gives Martin lots of room to point out that, say, ironclad patriarchal bloodlines cause problems. (That is, if you take away any magical justification, by virtue of connection to the land or the spirit realm or what have you, for the right to rule, then you stop having to have your One True Kings also be good people. It allows him to pull apart the different pieces of that trope and suggest that their being connected in the first place is questionable. Which it is! He’s right and he should say it!)

But the magic has to come back at some point, or else it’s really not high fantasy. And it seems like what he wanted to do was have all these elements from outside Westeros--the White Walkers, that god whose name I’ve forgotten, and Daenerys with her dragons--converge on it such that the characters would have to go back to their deep history and call those things back up in order to deal with the real world they live in (instead of the wealthy political bubble of all the scheming) and thus get to a point where they could actually change their system for the better. You can think of it as a very elaborate deus ex machina in a way, except the deus ex machina isn’t Daenerys showing up with dragons to fight the White Walkers or Arya having trained (again, outside Westeros, for the record) just the right way for killing the Night King. It’s all of these external forces forcing the characters in Westeros to get their fucking shit together. Otherwise there’s really no resolution to the war, in a high fantasy version of the story. It’s just historical fiction with some weird bells and whistles. Without a need to go back and figure out whatever the First Men were up to, there’s no incentive to go back to the numinous. That he intended for sure that some version of a return of the numinous end up being a big part of the climax is reinforced for me by the fact that the Starks--again, the backbone of the whole story--are set up as being unusually in touch with this mystic/magical heritage (the old gods, the crypt, the godswood) and unusually faithful to the traditional ways. They were introduced that way for a reason.

So where does Bran come in. The thing is that Bran is literally named after the mythic founding king of Westeros, Bran the Builder. The other thing is that both of those Brans are clearly named after Bran the Blessed, a literal mythic god-king from Welsh mythology whose name means crow (but who for various reasons also often gets associated with ravens, which in turn are commonly associated with transcendent knowledge, magic, etc; it’s a long story). So you have a younger member of the story’s key Stark family, already closer to the sources of magic and mystery than most. You name him after the founder of Westeros who lived in a time of magic, traffic with other beings, and great building works and other inherited accomplishments for which the associated knowledge has since been lost, etc. You have him gain mystical abilities to transfer his consciousness to other bodies, or through time (absolutely typical Mystic Powers). You have him even take on a special priestly status passed down from the era of magic by leaving Westeros to hang out with other kinds of magical beings, which means he is now explicitly named both Bran and Raven.

OBVIOUSLY this kid is supposed to be king. He’s going to restore the realm to a situation in which the ruler, the realm, its various life forces and nature spirits, and the metaphysical are all connected to one another and, in a sense, present in the same body (which is the kind of genuine mythological shit high fantasy is always drawing on). But the writers then just sat around and did nothing with him for years on end until whoops hey he’s king now. Of course no one thinks it makes any sense!! It’s fucking malpractice!!!!

If you go to the GOT Wiki and just read Bran’s page, everything makes sense and lines up well in terms of a list of events. (Although it’s really notable how short the entry from s8 is, and how everything it lists is things that happen to Bran, pretty much.) There is a progression that makes sense. But from what I understand--this was certainly the situation when I stopped watching--nothing was ever done to suggest that any of this mattered. The Three-Eyed Raven, the forest spirits, the magics and so on--it was treated at most as a backstory machine. It had no connection to or effect on the rest of the story, so far as I can tell. The fact that none of this played into the battle with the White Walkers at all is flatly insane. The thing I most remember people saying about Bran after that episode wasn’t even “Why didn’t he use X or Y that he learned in the forest?” but “Why was he there?” which just goes to show how completely and utterly bungled this entire piece of the narrative was. Like, if your high fantasy story is making its audience ask “Why would the story put the one character with the greatest knowledge of ancient magics and powers at the scene of a battle against an all-but-forgotten ancient threat,” then I’m sorry, it has gone fully off the rails, and not just in its most recent season. That’s not subversion, it’s just fully dropping the ball.

You know what would make sense as a lead-in to Bran becoming king? Oh, his performing some spectacular feat of insight, magic, strategy, or all three at the battle that no one else could have pulled off because no one else had his background or powers. Even after years of screwing this part of the story over, that could at least have bothered to make a case for why any of it mattered to the rest of the story. It would not have been very subversive, but when you’ve fucked up this royally you don’t get to be precious about your radikal innovative approach, Davids. I can’t believe Peter Dinklage had to sit there and make a bullshit speech about storytelling, when a decently-handled story would have made it seem natural and self-evident by then (you can still have surprises along the way!) that Bran should be king.

Anyway, in closing: part of the reason I checked out when I did was that I felt like they weren’t doing the things I thought they should do as the story developed. Genuinely, one key part of that was that they seemed to be doing absolutely nothing with Bran, which was baffling to me because it seemed obvious to me he was set up to be an incredibly important character. At the time, I thought they were going somewhere close to this with Bran but just taking way too long at it for some reason. What’s now clear is that the showrunners didn’t understand what they should have been doing with him. (Everybody who was taken aback by this outcome is not a fool for not seeing this. They were, quite reasonably, following the narrative cues they were given along the way, all of which said “Bran doesn’t matter.” It’s maybe clearer to me because I stopped watching.) And what that now makes clear, in my opinion, is that they never really understood what Martin was trying to do by “subverting fantasy tropes”; that in fact they didn’t really understand the genre, let alone what subverting it entailed. Which is exactly what bothered me about it even years after I stopped watching, but couldn’t put my finger on--until, ironically, they proved me right about Bran.

#game of thrones #bran stark #bran the builder #bran the blessed #i really tried no to write this bc who wants to get into got discourse right now but i couldn't get it off my mind #so here #i had a whole thing about disability and the fisher king but honestly it wasn't necessary #let's just say i think what martin (presumably) had in mind for ''bran the broken'' was something more complex #probably still fucked up! but differently

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perkwunos · 6 years ago

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Silvia Federici has pointed out that alongside the rise of “capitalist technological innovation” there has been “the disaccumulation of our precapitalist knowledges and capacities”:

The capacity to read the elements, to discover the medical properties of plants and flowers, to gain sustenance from the earth, to live in woods and forests, to be guided by the stars and winds on the roads and the seas was and remains a source of ‘autonomy’ that had to be destroyed. The development of capitalist industrial technology has been built on that loss and has amplified it. (191)

This disaccumulation has had strong effects in our very relation to what knowledge is. There is no longer a living knowledge, something directly known. “Life” and “knowledge” become opposed elements: knowledge is value-free and objective where life is valuative and subjective. This is not just the inevitable result of further specialization, but is carried to its extreme limits by the disconnection at all times between the creation of our world and the means by which we do so. Knowledge about how to practice things outside of specific rote mechanical skills is a power and “autonomy” not suitable for the typical wage laborer. Because of this, the modern worldview has approached its knowledge in an alienated and fetishizing way. It accords special status to the end-product of the experiment detached from the purposive, creative activity of the experimenter: its theories and formulae are seen as insights into a value-free, objective nature, while experience, lived time, intentionality etc. are seen as illusory. The essential contradiction that reveals the perversity is that this “value-free” knowledge is acquired by valuing the types of life-activity that will produce it. As A.N. Whitehead put it, “Scientists animated by the purpose of proving that they are purposeless constitute an interesting subject for study.” His point here is literally true: the role of knowledge under capitalist conditions is an anthropological subject that will increasingly attract attention, as an example of these capitalist conditions’ depraved effects.

The American pragmatists, alongside Whitehead, argued against this dualism. The experimental method and the science that it produces is continuous with the rest of nature, having evolved out of it: it is an organic, meaningful process. The way the modern scientist learns is the same way that all lifeforms learn. Eduardo Kohn, following C.S. Peirce, proposed that all living things have a “scientific intelligence”, in that they are capable of learning by experience (77). The forest is teeming with this intelligence in its diverse manifestations, organisms interpreting their environment and producing further signs. It’s in signs that we think and gain knowledge, in the uncertain meanings by which we “read the elements”--and this is always done with some purpose: meanings are means to an end, expressions of an intentionality. As Kohn put it, “it is appropriate to consider telos—that future for the sake of which something in the present exists—as a real causal modality wherever there is life” (37). A living thing acts to achieve an aim, and in the course of doing so it not only conceptualizes and valuates its object of desire but interprets its environment, working according to meaning-structures through which it can interact with the potential future: this potential future is, after all, the location for the possible achievement of its desires. Insofar as the meaning-structures work, they reveal some knowledge: in this way all life produces its science.

There’s no nonarbitrary point at which we can claim a stop to the evolutionary continuity of this valuative activity, even if we find grades of complexity and various distinctions in its modes of being. Just as the boundary at which point one organism stops being one species and evolves into another cannot be given a fixed delineation, the point at which “life” itself begins cannot be defined, so that an absolute outside to it is not rationally conceivable. “Telos,” purpose, must be found everywhere. All becoming occurs according to what the interiority of the becoming thing conceptualizes or intends. However, this interiority in its becoming must relate to its given environment, take on material constraints and direct its intentions to what can be achieved in the given world. The material constraints in their determining capacity habituate desires to flow specific ways. Our technology is dependent not on any eternal laws or corresponding brute mechanisms, but on the habits strongly ingrained in the intentionality of various entities: most especially the entities most typically considered lifeless who seem to show a minimum of will-power, interpretation, or novelty. Modern scientific understanding approaches from the outside in its description of these processes and thus misses the fundamental concept of habit, of a general aim socially pursued in desire. As a consequence these notions--intentionality, desire, generality, value etc.--are rediscovered on the purely human level and given misleading form.

The 21st century has already seen a wealth of thinkers criticizing and attempting to move past this human exceptionalism and dualism, as evidenced in the “posthuman” focus of many thinkers in anthropology and related social sciences, from Eduardo Kohn to Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway. As Federici put it, there is “the emergence of another rationality not only opposed to social and economic injustice but reconnecting us with nature and reinventing what it means to be a human being” (196). But this will not just come about through academics creating new terminology and concepts. Rather, like the shift towards modern thought that accompanied capitalism’s onset, it will be happening within and through movements that change our material basis, i.e. the change in property relations and how they define our ability to work with one another and with our environment. That is to say, these philosophical and anthropological concepts concerning the supersedence of dualism, new understandings of subjectivity and meaning, etc. must be approached historically: their existence is not sustained by an individual consciousness interacting with a book but by the functioning of whole societies. Federici points to one important site for the further emergence of new modes of consciousness in “women’s struggles over reproductive work”:

… there is something unique about this work—whether it is subsistence farming, education, or childrearing—that makes it particularly apt to generate more cooperative social relations. Producing human beings or crops for our tables is in fact a qualitatively different experience than producing cars, as it requires a constant interaction with natural process whose modalities and timing we do not control. (195)

The reproductive labor that has been gendered as “women’s work” may indeed reveal a different logic from the typical view of industrial production that sees it as an instance of what Philippe Descola termed the “heroic model of creation”:

The idea of production as the imposition of form upon inert matter is simply an attenuated expression of the schema of action that rests upon two interdependent premises: the preponderance of an individualized intentional agent as the cause of the coming-tobe of beings and things, and the radical difference between the ontological status of the creator and that of whatever he produces. (323)

Under capitalist conditions the value of reproductive labor is often hidden from being socially recognized, isolated into the domestic sphere, while the dominant mode of socially recognizing the value of our activity occurs through wage-labor and commodification, i.e. through the value-form. The shift away from this bifurcating ordering of production could also mark a shift away from our bifurcation of reality into intentional subjects and brute objects--instead rediscovering a thoroughly intersubjective (and, indeed, interobjective) process.

There’s no question that where we are attempting to reinvent such fundamental categories, we are caught up in a metaphysical and speculative pursuit--and thoroughly metaphysical figures like Whitehead and Peirce have gained new life among recent thinkers--but we also shouldn’t take “metaphysical” thinking to mean an airy detachment. Following Whitehead, I see metaphysics and speculative philosophy as an historical endeavour: as he put it, it is like an airplane that must lift off from a specific moment, spend some time in imaginative construction and reconstruction, and touch back down. I would historicize Whitehead’s thought even further; not to fundamentally alter his methodology nor his scheme of thought, but to point to some differences in the location and situation it is in response to. For instance, Whitehead often overemphasizes the responsibility of Aristotelian philosophy and its notion of substance for modern philosophy’s focus on atomized individuals. We may instead see this as not some development occurring just in the world of philosophy, but rather as a reflection in these modern philosophers’ thoughts of the material development of capitalism, its alienation and atomization. Whitehead offered a radical and deep critique of this alienation in its higher-level ideological expressions, and in doing so passed on a crucial tool for our existential understanding, clearing blockages of long-accumulated modes of thought and shifting the momentum in our perspectives away from those reflecting bourgeois categories. But we must also recognize that these errors in thought are part and parcel of a wider social problem that has to be faced in more than reformulating categories, that the direction of our consciousness towards such reformulations find their drive in the wider struggles of our life.

Works cited:

Descola, Philippe. Beyond nature and culture. University of Chicago Press, 2013

Federici, Silvia. Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons. PM Press, 2019.

Kohn, Eduardo. How Forests Think: toward an Anthropology beyond the Human. University of California Press, 2013.

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whentherewerebicycles · 5 years ago

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one of my biggest pet peeves in discussing literature is when someone is like “yeah.. I mean it’s pretty cool because like.. nobody was really talking about this back then?” it is the discussing-a-book equivalent of tumblr users yelling OMG WHY IS NOBODY TALKING ABOUT THIS [link to a major news outlet].

it bothers me partly because it’s almost always incorrect and is just lazy historicizing (I didn’t know about X, therefore X must not have existed). but mostly it bothers me because it’s one of the strategies Joanna Russ identifies in how to suppress women’s writing for isolating a woman writer from the cultural conversations that influenced her work and the creative networks helped her develop & test those ideas. the figure of the isolated genius—who emerges ex-nihilo, is wholly self-sufficient, and gives birth to his own genius—is a fundamentally masculine myth. in literary history, its function is often to conceal the unpaid labor that mothers, daughters, sisters, and wives did to give the Male Genius time and space to write. when applied to women writers, its function is usually to elide the whole constellation of women writers, teachers, and interlocutors who the writer in question was engaging with and responding to.

instead of saying “wow... so cool that [woman writer] wrote about these issues way back when nobody else was talking about them,” we should always be asking: “wow—who else was she talking to? what was she reading? what was happening around her that had her thinking about this topic? who did she hang out around, write long letters to, get in heated debates with?” the first response ends the conversation. the second opens it up, sending you down paths you might never have even known to look for otherwise.

ok end post-book club rant lol

#it was a nice book club and ill go again #and i didnt say any of this bc im not an asshole #so i have to vent it here lol #but honestly someone saying ‘yeah it’s amazing that she was writing about gender in the ‘70s when nobody else was really talking about it’#makes me stare in to the camera like i’m on the office #nobody.. was talking...? about feminism? in the 70s??????#nobody.. was using science fiction... to think about class and gender politics?????#like these are all college educated people many of whom have advanced degrees #i don’t expect everyone to be experts in literary history but like.... my dude.... why not do the most cursory google search #IT MAKES ME EXTREMELY FEARFUL #AND JUST SAD. we are truly so cut off from previous generations of feminist thought #idk i have a lot of feelings

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stoweboyd · 5 years ago

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On Sleep Divorce

A year or so ago, I began to sleep apart from my wife a few nights a week, particularly when I stayed up later than her. We have three bedrooms and no one else living with us at present, so there's extra rooms.

My wife says she'd rather we slept together, but I think we both sleep better and get more rest this way.

I am accumulating stories about sleep divorce, as a result.

In 'Sleep Divorce' and the Case for Splitting Up at Night, Mallika Rao, looks into ‘the virtues of splitting up for the night’, and cites several authors on the topic, and threads into the piece her breakup that was motivated in part at least by a desire for sleep privacy:

In this frame of mind, I picked up The Bedroom, a fascinating if somewhat abstruse recent book by the historian Michelle Perrot. Translated by Lauren Elkin from French, it uses the titular space as a laboratory for observers to study the breadth of human nature. Perrot examines texts over several centuries to consider children’s nurseries, workers’ quarters, hotel rooms, and other sleeping chambers. (She limits her focus to the Western Hemisphere.) I was drawn to the book thanks to the neat metaphoric heft of the shared bedroom. It seemed to me that breaking down its history might clarify the social norms that dictate unions more generally. If I understood how the marital bedroom became a presumed standard, I might break from a rigid way of seeing things and open my mind to all the transmutations available to a couple in search of the right form for them. In short, I picked up The Bedroom in hopes of restoring my interest in partnership.

What I believe I found instead is an incidental argument in favor of nightly separation. Despite its pointed historicism, the book reads at times as an annotation to certain ongoing and resolutely modern narratives—a companion script to the past decade in lifestyle news and pop culture. Perrot exhorts readers to take seriously the relevance of sleep to biological and emotional functioning; she discusses the need for new structural norms for marriage; and she frames the bedroom as a haven for respite, a construct with special relevance at a time when a phoneless room can feel like a mythical destination.

She goes on to discuss Balzac’s 1929 work The Physiology of Marriage where he ultimately comes down on the side of separate bedrooms:

Separate bedrooms, then? Not feasible for many of us, but perhaps a conceptual northern star for those in search of peace between obligations to the self and obligations to others (and the promise of a possible palliative, at the very least, for my own anxieties). Perrot name-checks intellectuals who thought as much: Centuries apart, Michel de Montaigne and Jean-Paul Sartre preferred to sleep alone—Montaigne while married, and Sartre while in a partnership with Simone de Beauvoir. So, too, did the writer Virginia Woolf, who slept apart from her husband, Leonard. Her lecture titled “A Room of One’s Own” famously gave rise to the notion that solitude is a prerequisite for serious thought. In modern times, the practice of nightly separation allows for better sleep and comfort, Perrot writes, without “indicat[ing] any lack of love.” Centuries before her, Balzac weighed in with more gusto. Couples who veer into different rooms at day’s end “have become either divorced, or have attained to the discovery of happiness,” he wrote. They “either abominate or adore each other.”

In Dear Mona, How Many Couples Sleep in Separate Beds?, Mona Chalabi of FiveThirtyEight looks into ‘sleep divorce’, statistically.

This seems to omit what I bet is a common case: different sleep ‘weights’ and sleeping times. For example, I go to sleep later and wake up earlier than my wife, and she is a light sleeper. So, if I come to bed at 12am she might wake up and have difficulty going back to sleep, and then she often complain about it the next day. We also fall into the different temperature problem: she likes it cold, with a thick comforter, and I’d rather warmer with just sheet and blanket.

So she is hypothetically unhappy with the sleep divorce, but I am happier by far.

#sleep divorce

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panoptiphobia · 6 years ago

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Dissertation Prospectus: The Development of South Korean Prisons and Penology, 1945-1961

Dissertation Prospectus

[Please DM for file with full citations]

“The Development of South Korean Prisons and Penology, 1945-1961”

I. Project Overview

Stripped of its legitimating discourses, imprisonment is the simple act of putting human beings into cages. By the mid-twentieth century, the practice of incarceration had spread by means of Western colonial expansion to nearly every area of the globe. Many of the formal vestiges of empire fell away after the second World War, but Western-style incarceration remained a worldwide practice. The project to modernize the Korean prison system continued long after its initial development during the Japanese colonial period (1910-1945). After a chaotic period under the United States Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK; hereafter “MG”) (1945-1948), South Korean penal officials were immediately swept up in bold prison reform efforts. My dissertation research examines the ways South Korean penal reformers imagined the past, present and future of the prison system during Korea’s tumultuous 1950s. I am working to map the cultural, political and economic influences on Korean penology and its discourses in the early Cold War era. The United States government relied on the internal stability of South Korea as an East Asian bulwark against communism, and directly shaped the development of the penal system within the Cold War system. This study has larger implications for the general history of 1950s South Korea, Cold War international relations, and the development of power and social control in the Republic of Korea (ROK) state by historicizing a crucial institution used for state control of the incarcerated and free population alike. This dissertation will argue for rereading the history of the South Korean prison as a crucial site for the production of notions of ROK national identity and citizenship.

The historical timeline of this project extends from Korea’s liberation from Japanese rule and subsequent division by the U.S. and Soviet Union in 1945, through the Korean War (1950-1953) and fall of the Syngman Rhee regime in 1960, and ends with the coup d’etat by General Park Chung Hee in 1961. After the establishment of the Republic of Korea in 1948, penal reformers proclaimed the goal of “democratizing” the prison system under the slogan ‘Democratic Penology’ (minju haenghyŏng). Prior to the Korean War, prisons were underfunded, overcrowded, and used for ostentatious performances of anticommunist conversion. However, by the late 1950s penal officials boasted of the prisons’ humane conditions and state-of-the-art rehabilitative and educational function. Exhibitions displaying prisoners’ paintings, calligraphy, craftworks and writings evidenced their “reformation” for the public. How did the state of prisons change so drastically over a single decade, and how much of these claims is simple propaganda? These purportedly liberal reforms were carried out by the notorious authoritarian regime of South Korea’s first president, Syngman Rhee. Penal practice departed drastically from reformist theory when it came to punishing political opponents of the regime, but the prison system nevertheless did see major changes in the overall treatment of prisoners and training of penal officers. At the same time, this official narrative of reform is conspicuously silent with regard to the state of prisons during the Korean War (1950-1953), a period in which tens of thousands of political prisoners were massacred.

The devastation of the conflict left nearly every South Korean penal facility in ruins. Postwar reconstruction efforts focused not only on the rebuilding of existing prisons, but also the addition of new, state of the art facilities. With the help of material aid from the United Nations and the United States, Korean penal reformers began to transform their system in the image of their Cold War allies. Post-Korean War penal practice took on the guiding ideologies of liberal democracy and ‘penal education’ (kyoyuk hyŏng). The new system emphasized job training and rehabilitation of prisoners for reentering society. Penal reformers also embarked on UN-sponsored trips abroad to study the prison systems of the U.S. and Western European countries. These officials debated responses to the challenges facing their system in the pages of professional journals and books on penology and its history. While the period spanning South Korea’s first republic (1948-1960) stands as a crucial first stage of autonomous penal reform, it remains understudied in the field of Korean history.

Through my analysis of the discourse in professional journals of penal administrators, prisoner educational materials, and the memoirs of former guards and inmates, I will ask the following questions: What rules governed what could be said about the socially deviant and their treatment? What behavior constituted true violation of the social contract and what acts would be punishable by death? How and why was the idea of rehabilitation of convicts sold to the public? How were these rules affected by the Cold War system? What statements were qualified and by whom? When penal reform efforts were obviously failing, what political goals were achieved by state officials and civil society members claiming the contrary? Why was it culturally and socially significant to portray images of the well-ordered prison to the populous? I will trace the changes in these discourses of criminality and reform in the early ROK to explicate the pivotal role of punishing the deviant in the reflexive formation of national identity and solidification of state power.

II. Theoretical Framework: The Prison, the State, and Power

This dissertation, as it deals with the repressive apparatus of the prison, also deals concomitantly with theories of state power and violence. It interrogates the thesis of colonial continuity in the post-liberation state. The Korean history field assumes direct continuity between the colonial and post-liberation states without agreeing on a clear methodology or framework for locating which actors and institutions qualify as the “state.” Max Weber, one of the many scholars expounding on just what constitutes the state, defined it as the “human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force.” The parenthetical status of “success” in this translation perfectly reflects the tension at the heart of this project. The prison system was a vital tool for solidifying state power that acutely manifested the evolving relationship between subject and sovereign, but its supporters constantly struggled to defend its legitimacy and exaggerated the effectiveness of reforming inmates in the crisis-ridden institution. The U.S. occupation and Syngman Rhee regime inherited the colonial prison system’s veneer of legitimacy in incarceration as a practice resulting from due process of law, but continually reverted to extrajudicial and exceptional violence to solidify control of their territory. Giorgio Agamben’s work reveals this sovereign exception, the violent act of exclusion of the killable other from qualified political life, to be as old as the polis itself. Agamben amends Michel Foucault’s notion of state racism—the normalizing precondition that allows for killing internal others —to include all states, not just their modern and totalitarian instantiations. However, analyzing cases under the the Cold War system presents novel challenges to these theories of state power and violence: ROK authorities’ indiscriminate massacre of ideological prisoners without regard for loss of legitimacy reveals that their monopoly of violence was legitimated by the external machinations of Cold War containment, rather than an internally derived pact between the state and citizenry. This dissertation examines the shifting status of ROK sovereignty and authority to punish and kill through periods of both occupation and an “autonomous” South Korean government.

The U.S. occupation had to ‘rebuild’ the state in the momentary absence of the Japanese colonial repressive apparatus: this dissertation views prison-building as a part of state-building. Bruce Cumings has shown how Korea’s transition period from colonial to occupation state power was a crucible for popular resistance to underlying social contradictions that often pitted the rural populace against representatives of central power in the capital. Penal systems have a distinct function for suppressing such revolt by controlling bodies and flow of information in prescribed spaces, part of a process that Anthony Giddens calls “internal pacification.” Internal pacification is a generalized phenomenon that establishes “locales” to “promot[e] the discipline of potentially recalcitrant groups at major points of tension, especially in the sphere of production.” Neither the U.S. military occupation nor the fledgling Rhee government could claim total control of the peninsula’s mountainous regions, but improving surveillance networks through an archipelago of carceral institutions made both rebel activity and common criminality ‘legible’ as sets of tables, statistics and programs for social engineering. This project will treat provincial jails and prisons as outposts of pacification, simplification, and the spread of central power to the whole of the Korean peninsula.

Researching postcolonial societies in their immediate post-liberation period also reveals the nebulous nature of the state as a set of institutions, discursive effects, and material realities. Timothy Mitchell has proposed analyzing the state “not as an actual structure, but as the powerful, metaphysical effect of practices that make such structures appear to exist.” At various points in the analysis of early ROK penal history, the prison system appears as more idealistic rhetoric than fact, but it nonetheless projected the effects of a (re)developing state apparatus. Examining Korea’s ‘Liberation Space’—the period after 1945 when political control of the Korean peninsula was still in flux—and tenuous sovereignty after 1948 is better served by Foucauldian power analysis and his idea of ‘governmentality’: the “institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power, which has as its target population, as its principal form of knowledge political economy, and as its essential technical means apparatuses of security.”

This approach allows for analyzing discourse as both an instrument and effect of power, identifying the “decentered and productive nature of power processes.” Traditional political histories fail to locate, or misattribute state power as a possession of a select few actors in the Syngman Rhee regime without accounting for the persistent local contestations to central power or the ambiguous status of South Korea’s sovereignty in the U.S.-dominated Cold War system. This dissertation asks how power was produced and maintained in early South Korea by diverse sets of actors and discursive effects of state and non-state institutions alike. Foucault’s reframing of modern power as a matrix of relations dispersed throughout the social body allows for thinking social existence beyond the juridical and state horizon: Power is not held, but constantly negotiated. Previous scholarship has looked for the emergence of such Foucauldian phenomena as governmentality, biopower, and panopticism before and after colonial annexation, but there has been little scholarship about what became of these dispersed power relations in the interlude between the colonial and U.S. occupation, how they were reified in the military government, or how they manifested in the ROK state. Korea’s ‘Liberation Space’ has been characterized as a power vacuum, but one can reexamine the period through the prison as a representative institution that facilitated the continued spread of disciplinary power in post-liberation society. Analyzing governmentality in this period problematizes Foucauldian models’ linear progression toward the telos of the Western European nation-state. Was the spread of these technologies of colonial state power truly continuous? Or was their spread halted and then redeveloped? Is modern power a one-way threshold or cyclical phenomenon capable of starts and stops, progression and regression? The broader goal of this research is to examine the rebirth and/or afterlives of governmentality and modern power in post-liberation Korea.

III. Methodology

This dissertation will utilize discourse analysis to track changes in notions of criminality, deviance, and its punishment in post-liberation Korea. The existing penal historical scholarship on the early South Korean prison system, which is minimal, has merely identified the gaps between penal officials’ theory and their practice, limiting analysis to the immediate space and functions of the prison and simply concluding that little had changed between the colonial and ROK penal systems. This narrow approach confines historical analysis to prison spaces without accounting for the myriad social forces that shape penal policy and their (in)efficacies.

A more thorough Foucauldian discourse analysis will allow for reading between the lines of official discourse to identify subtle changes in framing and rhetoric that signify larger currents in not just the prison system, but in the broader society as well. Shifts in penal discourse reflect changes in modes of production, emergence of new mentalities, and changes in power relations between the citizen and state. This dissertation will ask why significant thematic shifts in penal discourse occurred when they did, identifying the larger social and historical forces that shaped popular assumptions about citizenship and its deviant other. This analysis will answer these questions to account for the porous nature of prisons as spaces productive of a power that comes to permeate all social relations in the modern state. It will identify the dialectical nature of the prison that both affects and is affected by social and historical change.

More specifically, this dissertation will primarily focus on the post-Korean War discourse of “democratic penology” (minju haenghyŏng), a guiding principle of late-1950s penological texts that elevated the rehabilitation of the prisoner to the status of (re)building the nation itself. A more integrated analysis of both official and public discourse on punishment reveals the ways the Cold War system came to colonize the very consciousness and subjectivity of ROK citizens, shaping the way individuals viewed basic categories of the criminal and what constituted the ideal democratic citizen. One of the basic arguments of this dissertation is that early South Korean penal culture was fundamentally shaped by transnational interaction with the penological regimes of the U.S. and United Nations during the Korean War. The Cold War system influenced penology by reframing rehabilitation as the necessary work of reforming unruly bodies susceptible to idleness and communism into industrious, educated participants in the crusade to build a “Free World.” In this way, the Syngman Rhee’s anticommunist authoritarian state regime utilized prisons as both a productive and repressive technology for maintaining control of prisoners and the broader public. Images of ideal ROK citizenship found their other not only externally, with the positioning of South Korea as the anticommunist opposition to their northern counterparts; ROK identity was also formed through the isolation, confinement, and reform of the internal deviant other.

IV. Writing Korea into Global Penal Historiography

This dissertation is an attempt to write Korea into the broader field of penal history to better understand local instantiations of the global spread of incarceration. The current field of U.S. penal history was largely inspired by the historiographical turn of the 1970s that reframed punishment as a technology of social control. While their theoretical approaches differ, penal historians working in the 1970s and 1980s fundamentally refuted the traditional narrative of the prison as a self-evidentiary necessity or universal good. Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975) has had the most lasting impact on penal historians for fundamentally reframing the role of prisons in the development of novel forms of power, governance, and modern subjectivity. Foucault revealed the prison as a key site for examining the production of docile, normalized bodies in modern states. Additionally, the prison produced discourse of the deviant recidivist and presented itself as the sole answer to this self-generated problem. Foucault viewed this normalizing ‘power/knowledge’ of the deviant as both a repressive and productive force. These Foucauldian concepts help to contextualize the historical developments of post-1945 South Korean penal culture, where authorities repeatedly committed to the “failing” prison system while simultaneously producing knowledge about the criminal and deviant. This dissertation will interrogate the persistence of the prison form and its normalizing discourses across ruptures of the liberation, division, and the Korean War.

The field of Western penal history has been significantly focused on explaining the persistence of the prison despite its continual failure to achieve its proponents’ goals. The group of scholars contributing to The Oxford History of the Prison (1995) demonstrate that modern incarceration has almost always been ineffective in attaining its changing and even conflicting goals. For the purpose of reform, it has historically been impossible to find meaningful correlation between the quality of imprisonment and deterrence of crime. Prison also does not satisfy the public need for retribution: at any given time, the majority of citizens of modern societies perceive punishment as overly lenient. Even when the prisoner is simply considered a source of cheap or free labor, there are varied conclusions regarding the efficacy of productive labor in penal history. The general consensus is that Western imprisonment seldom, if ever, achieved the intended goals of its implementation: it self-perpetuates despite its internal contradictions. Rebecca McLennan has shown how U.S. penal reformers at various points from the nineteenth to mid-twentieth century continually portrayed the prison in a state of “crisis” as it expanded and solidified its hold as the dominant form of punishment. Crises in the modern state, both manufactured and real are met with political attention, expenditure of resources, and bureaucracy that takes on an expansionist logic and life of its own. Further research in Korean penal history presents a crucial case study for the persistence of the carceral form in material conditions starkly different from its development in Western Europe and the United States. It must critically examine the highly propagandistic discourse of early ROK reformers with evidence of the material conditions of war and poverty that threatened the very existence of the carceral apparatus throughout the 1950s.

Some penal sociologists claim that Foucauldian explanations for carceral expansion are too instrumentalist. David Garland challenges the Foucauldian view of an agentless, rational power driving the expansion of the carceral state, and revitalizes the Durkheimian view of punishment as the public’s passionate retribution against social deviance. For these scholars, punishment is highly imbued with cultural meaning and public participation. Garland seeks to go beyond Foucault’s perspective on power, demonstrating the ways the prison “satisfies a popular (or a judicial) desire to inflict punishment upon law-breakers and to have them dismissed from normal social life, whatever the long-term costs or consequences.” Philip Smith further questions Foucault’s erasure of the role of irrational concerns and cultural values in punishment. He responds to the Foucauldians, “how does the ideal type of disciplinary power intersect with broader systems of meaning? How does the civil sphere participate in surveillance? Under what circumstances might spectacle still play a role in social control?” This research will hold these approaches in tension with Foucauldian analysis, a framework developed from the specific historical case of Western European nation-states. Examining the sudden reversal to punitive retribution against social and ideological deviance during the Korean War must account for Korean penal development’s post-colonial and Cold War historical specificities.

This dissertation is further informed by Western penal historical scholarship that emphasizes the porous nature of prisons as social and cultural entities. Some have amended the Foucauldian view of one-way discursive production of prisoner identity as it overlooks the ways deviant subgroups were defined and defined themselves. Others have revealed how penal regimes respond to external stimuli, and sometimes even serve as the primary impetus for political formations in free society. Accordingly, historicizing the development of South Korean prisons must account for their reciprocal relationship to political and economic dynamics in the broader society along with the development of an emerging ROK national identity. The prison must be examined in its Korean context, as well as the regional and global context of the Cold War.

Contemporary penal historians have charted the expansion of the Western prison form to the rest of globe outside of Europe and North America. Comparative penal histories further accentuate the importance of differing local conditions that shaped the African, Latin American, and Asian experiences of penal modernization. Contributors to the influential volume, Cultures of Confinement (2007) center the role of cultural practices and social dynamics to develop a more comprehensive approach that “highlight[s] the extent to which common knowledge is appropriated and transformed by very distinct local styles of expression dependent on the political, economic, social and cultural variables of particular institutions and social groups.” Frank Dikotter reminds us that the prison, like all institutions, “was never simply imposed or copied, but was reinvented and transformed by a host of local factors, its success being dependent on its flexibility.” Not every case of colonial prison expansion was “successful” for colonial aims: Peter Zinoman’s Colonial Bastille demonstrates how French colonial prison spaces facilitated intellectual exchange across dispersed geographic locations and helped foment a Vietnamese national identity amongst otherwise disparate linguistic and ethnic groups of Southeast Asia. Clare Anderson presented a case with the opposite effect in British colonial India, where the prison forced cohabitation of traditionally segregated social castes—an offense severe enough to foment popular uprising across the subcontinent. Despite vast differences with the case of Korea, these examples demonstrate how development of the western prison form was not always an unproblematic or effortless technique of social control: the spatial entity of the prison brought together diverse social forces, impacting existing local conditions and drawing dynamic responses to reorganization of the social order. The same attention to local dynamics must be applied to the crisis-ridden early ROK prison system that took more than a decade to clothe, feed, and properly contain its inmates.

The English-language penal historical field’s shift in focus to colonial prisons revealed challenges to Foucault’s emphasis of the advent of disciplinary power in modern incarceration. While previous scholarship on the global rise of imprisonment framed colonial institutions as “laboratories of modernity” that employed state of the art technologies for effective governance, Zinoman found that “[French] colonial prison officials introduced no such innovations and ignored many of the putatively modern methods of prison administration that had been developed in Europe and the United States during the nineteenth century.” Dikötter emphasized that colonial or peripheral iterations of the penitentiary deviate from the Foucauldian narrative of imprisonment’s shift away from corporal punishment: “a history of the prison shows not so much the ‘disciplinary power’ of the modern state but on the contrary the many limits of the government in controlling its own institutions: prisons were run by a customary order established by guards and prisoners on the ground rather than by a panopticon project on paper.” Florence Bernault cites the persistence of retributive and deterrent violence in African colonial regimes to refute the correlation between modern governance and the decline of “state-inflicted destruction.” Proponents of the Western penitentiary reframed free individuals as subjects, while the colonial prison primarily constructed colonial individuals as objects of power. Black and brown bodies bore the brunt of colonial, retributive violence well into the twentieth century despite changes in metropolitan nations. Historicizing the advent and persistence of the carceral form in Korea must allow for local specificity that challenges common Foucauldian narratives of the development of bloodless, disciplinary power. Widespread corporal punishment, torture, and destruction of the body was maintained in the penal practice of colonial and postcolonial Korea until as late as democratization in 1987.

The rise of the prison in Western European metropoles paralleled the extension of political rights of citizens in the rise of the modern liberal state, and thus held great promise for nascent anti-imperial and nationalist modernization movements. Following this model, East Asian powers enthusiastically adopted the prison as a tool of social control, producing a well-disciplined citizenry as a preemptive measure to resist colonization, or, in the case of Japan, forcing legal modernization on their neighbors as a strategy of colonial aggression. Prisons were quintessentially modern facilities that promised rehabilitation of human beings and the (re)invention of the nation itself. Frank Dikötter’s study shows how late-Qing and early republican reformers were quite successful in developing modern penal facilities and practices, so much so that Western imperial powers demanded a regression to corporal punishment to bolster the deterrent effects protecting their extraterritorial interests in China. This clearly demonstrates the Janus-faced nature of the Western penal form’s entrée into East Asia: modern disciplinary power was reserved for white bodies and the prison otherwise served imperialist, capitalist endeavors. Daniel Botsman further details the advent of East Asian penal modernization in Punishment and Power in the Making of Modern Japan. Botsman analyzes penal institutions in Japan before Western influence, their hasty reform in the Meiji era, and the use of legal reform discourse to justify imperial expansion into the rest of East Asia. Once the carceral form came to dominate Western imperialist discourse of legitimate exercise of state power, Japanese historians raced to locate its origins before Western imposition in the Tokugawa stockade. Japanese reformers quickly developed model prisons and flaunted them as both tools of colonial legitimation and repression in Korea and Taiwan. These works by Dikötter and Botsman are the most prominent English-language works writing East Asia into global penal history, but no such work yet exists for the Korean case. This dissertation will start to write Korea into global penal history, tracing the development of the carceral form on the Korean peninsula through its colonial introduction and extending analysis beyond liberation. Historicizing the postcolonial South Korean penal system will reveal the ways postcolonial penal regimes both reflected and challenged penological trends after World War II, when the world historical system that brought imprisonment to every corner of the globe entered a new phase of global struggle in the form of the Cold War.

V. Korean Penal Historiography

The following section will outline secondary scholarship in Korean penal history, highlighting the ways previous scholarship has been limited by the thesis of a dichotomy between premodern and modern forms of punishment, and between colonial oppression and Korean resistance. Korean penal historiography has primarily focused on the late-nineteenth century introduction of the carceral form and its uses during the Japanese Colonial Period (1910-1945) to suppress resistance to Japanese rule. Chosŏn penal culture was primarily retributive with legal institutions relying heavily on corporal punishment for deterrent effect, and torture to extract confessions. By prioritizing the mere deprivation of liberty over physical harm of the body, the 1890s codification of carceral punishment and conversion of flogging to units of time served represented a monumental shift towards rehabilitationist penal thought during the Taehan Empire (1897-1910) period. While the question of autonomy of the Korean state to carry out penal reforms without colonial manipulation is debated in existing scholarship, it is clear that the continued rationalization of the Korean criminal justice system in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries aided the subsequent colonial state’s penetration of everyday life on the peninsula.

Historicizing Korea’s first modern prisons cannot be separated from their use by the colonial regime to detain, torture, and execute members of resistance movements. Lee Jong-min has shown how colonial penal modernization had political dissent as a primary concern, and more general crime as an afterthought. The explicitly political nature of penal reform continued into the colonial period, and saw a racialized recommitment to bodily punishment and ideological conversion. Previous scholarship focuses almost entirely on colonial penal authorities’ persistent use of bodily torture to refute the notion of colonial prisons’ “modernity.” This view uncritically accepts both incarceration and modernity as positive developments in a linear progression of the humane treatment of the subject by state power. More problematically, it reifies the notion of a more “humane” form of incarceration that hypothetically would have developed had it not been for the colonial intervention.

Scholars inspired by the “colonial modernity” paradigm questioned nationalist historical narratives, and problematized notions of “distorted” modernity. They do not see flogging as a disqualifying factor for a novel type of state power under Japanese rule, and present a nuanced reading of the development of Foucauldian disciplinary power that retained corporal punishment due to local specificities of the Korean colonial context. Flogging Korean bodies in the presence of medical doctors was a sophisticated technology of social control used in lieu of the underdeveloped use of incarceration and monetary fines, punishments that colonial authorities feared had not yet been sufficiently internalized by the local populous as deterrents to crime. By the end of the colonial period, Korea’s premier penal institutions had factories, educational programs, and ideological conversion programs aimed at cultivating ideal imperial subjects. Korea’s penal modernization was indeed colored by the colonial experience, but this fact should not cloud analysis of the global spread of disciplinary power through both colonial regimes and their post-colonial successors.

The Korean history field still lacks a comprehensive work detailing Korea’s post-1945 penal history in either the Korean or English languages. The most thorough narrative can be found in the Republic of Korea Corrections Bureau’s official history. While useful as a starting point for scholarly research, the work presents a hagiographic account of the triumph of the ROK’s modern penal practice over traditional and colonial practices, and uncritically accepts the development of incarceration as desired progress. The most recent edition of this state-sponsored history retains the Cold War-influenced, anticommunist narratives of the division and Korean War, notably silencing the early ROK penal system’s use in ideological indoctrination, preventive custody of political prisoners, and massacres of political prisoners. Political concerns aside, this institutional history fails to place Korean penal history in its social and political context, taking the prison form for granted and extending its history backward from the present day.

More critical academic scholarship in penal history attempts to contextualize development of the ROK carceral system, but the field has largely overlooked the period between the peninsula’s Liberation in 1945 and the 1961 military coup by General Park Chung Hee. The seminal work of Bruce Cumings and contributors to the first volume of Haebang chŏnhusa ŭi insik (Korean History Before and After Liberation) clearly established the role of the U.S. military occupation government in appointing collaborators and veterans of the colonial system in the early ROK police and legal apparatuses. The specifics of post-liberation continuity in the penal system from the colonial period have yet to be properly fleshed out, but existing scholarship paints a picture of overcrowded, underfunded, escape-prone prisons in the wake of popular resistance to U.S. occupation policy. Prisons were most crowded following the crackdown of the Autumn Harvest Uprising of 1946, a series of widespread clashes between central authority and local supporters of the ‘people’s committees’ that had sprung up after liberation. Though his work focuses primarily on prisons during the later Park Chung Hee dictatorship, sociologist Ch’oe Chŏng-gi briefly examines the post-Liberation turnover of prisons to contextualize colonial continuities in the penology and ideological indoctrination of South Korea’s subsequent authoritarian regimes. He attempted to explicate the “real conditions” (silt’ae) of post-liberation penal spaces, revealing that most of the personnel retained their positions from the colonial system, and newly hired officials received minimal training that changed little from the colonial model. Pak Ch’an Sik’s work revealed the strain on the penal system when mainland prison facilities received an influx of detainees after the 1948 Cheju Uprising, a series of revolts on Cheju Island that were met with a protracted campaign by the MG and South Korean authorities to massacre leftists, their collaborators, and ordinary citizens caught in the fray. Further research utilizing U.S. military archival sources will facilitate a more detailed understanding of the MG’s role in penal modernization, its colonial legacies, and the Cold War’s impact on South Korea’s penal history.

There is even less scholarship dedicated to the penal system of the First Republic (1948-1960), but prison spaces served a crucial role in suppressing leftist activity from the founding of the ROK in 1948 to the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. Historian Kang Sŏng-hyŏn has provided detailed historical accounts of the early Rhee regime’s expanded categorization of “thought criminals” (sasangpŏm) after the 1948 passing of the National Security Law, the act that allows for the exemption of constitutional rights to due process and habeas corpus in cases related to national security. As prisons overflowed, the state attempted reeducation and conversion of ideological offenders through the euphemistically named National Guidance League (Kungmin podo yŏnmaeng). Historians working in the early 2000s exposed the history of forced reeducation and eventual wartime massacre of suspected leftists who were members of the League, but the League’s relationship to the penal apparatus needs to be examined further to better historicize changes in penal thought and practice at the founding of the First Republic.

Historical analysis of prisons during the Korean War emphasizes their use as sites of liberation or massacre while the peninsula changed hands back and forth between the ROK and DPRK. After the retaking of Seoul in the Fall of 1950, the Rhee regime used penal spaces for detainment and expedited execution of those suspected of collaborating with the Korean People’s Army (KPA) of North Korea. The literature on prisoners of war reveals a geopolitical layer to consider when charting the Cold War influence on Korean penal practice. Further research of the UN’s extensive POW and ROK civilian internee reeducation programs will show changes in ROK penal practice across the wartime rupture and account for the Cold War imposition of the Geneva Convention and United Nations-imposed penal paradigm. Nearly all of South Korea’s prison facilities were destroyed or damaged in the war, and reconstruction was still only partially complete as late as 1960. Other than a brief mention in the ROK Correctional Service official history, there appears to be no published research detailing the post-war reconstruction of the ROK penal system or its transformation to the “correctional” model in 1961. This dissertation will use diverse and previously underutilized primary sources to explicate the pivotal role of the prison and its discourses undergirding the social upheaval of the early ROK’s history of war and reconstruction.

VI. Primary Sources

Inspired by a Foucauldian model of discourse analysis, this research seeks to historicize changes in ROK penal culture by analyzing both official reform discourse and responses to its implementation on the ground. Primary source materials related to prisons in the immediate post-liberation period are scarce, and researchers must utilize both U.S. and local sources to develop even the most rudimentary account of the turnover of penal authority from colonial to occupation forces. The files of the United States Military Government in Korea contain the occupation government’s penal section records. MG administrators kept haphazard, and often handwritten reports on prison conditions and fluctuations in inmate totals, which also contained evaluations on changes in penal practice relative to their Japanese predecessors. These materials are invaluable for ascertaining the most basic information about the penal system after the transfer of authority from the Japanese colonial government to the U.S. military occupation. They will also help track the evolving MG penal discourse that celebrated perceived advances in reform while facing intensified resistance to the occupation. This dissertation will also analyze Korean print media sources to chart local perceptions and responses to prison overcrowding, organized escape attempts, and deteriorating prison conditions. After events like the Autumn Harvest Uprising of 1946, depictions of penal spaces and activities appear in more diverse archival sources produced by different sections of the military government tasked with suppressing rebellion, investigating hygienic conditions and prisoner abuse, and responding to reports of massacres.

This dissertation also examines the early development of the field of ROK penology—the study of prisons and penal practice. The liberation period saw a limited number of publications by Korean penologists establishing the state of their field with renewed purpose and the perspective of an autonomous institutional future in an independent Korean nation. These early publications include the first post-liberation issues of Penal Administration (Hyŏngjŏng), a successor to a similar colonial period penal journal that was then discontinued after the outbreak of the Korean War. Novelist Yoon Paek-nam also published a history of Korean penal culture, A History of Chosŏn Penal Administration (Chosŏn Hyŏngjŏngsa), in 1948. The work traces developments in punishment on the Korean peninsula from before the Three Kingdoms Period (57 BCE - 688 CE) through to the colonial period, and repositions the Korean people as the subject of their own penal modernization. Newspapers also served as both cheerleader and watchdog for early advances in South Korean penal administration.

With the outbreak of the Korean War, the body of available primary source material becomes sharply limited and shifts subject focus from typical penal administration to the handling of prisoners of war. The United Nations Command’s Provost Marshall section, the unit responsible for the handling of POWs and Civilian Internees (CI), kept extensive incident reports for cases of abuse, injury, and death of prisoners. The U.S. National Archives and Record Administration facility (NARA II) in College Park, Maryland holds extensive records, course materials, and correspondence related to POW reeducation programs. The same institution also holds vital materials related to wartime atrocities such as the massacres at Taejŏn Prison in the summer of 1950, and the summary execution of Sŏdaemun Prison inmates at Hongche-ri in the fall of same year.

The key primary source for analyzing post-Korean War penal development discourse is the Ministry of Justice professional journal, Penal Administration (Hyŏngjŏng). The monthly journal ran from 1952 to 1961 and featured a diverse range of articles on penal reform, musings on life as a prison guard, comics, poems, short stories, and reporting from observation tours of the penal facilities of the United States and other Cold War allies. Active penal administrators contributed to the journal and fleshed out the specifics of what it meant to “democratize” their vocation as public servants in an ostensibly democratic and developing society. This project will consider the subjectivity of prison guards (many of them veterans of the colonial prison system) in developing an autonomous penological ideal and institutional culture infused with nationalist and Cold War anticommunist ideology. Late-1950s newspapers profiled veteran prison guards, remarked on advances in penal practice since liberation, and introduced the public to the “new penology” of rehabilitation through arts, crafts and vocational training. The period also saw further development of the field of penology in international context with publications like Kwon T’ae-gŭn’s Penology (Haenghyŏnghak) in 1956. The prisoner magazine, New Path (Saegil) featured articles and creative works by prisoners for prisoner consumption, and is another vital source for understanding the specific content and messaging of rehabilitation programming. South Korean archives contain more official records and prisoner-targeted materials produced by the Ministry of Justice’s Penal Bureau, such as textbooks and approved recreational reading material, plays, and films. Further field work will also prioritize finding unofficial memoirs and eyewitness accounts of penal spaces to bring propagandistic claims of reformers and prisoner experience into the same frame of analysis. This project will also utilize interviews with former guards and inmates introduced through the network of historians associated with Seodaemun Prison History Hall.

Further archival work is needed to excavate the specific primary sources relevant to changes in prisons after Gen. Park Chung Hee’s 1961 coup d’état, but the period’s much improved administrative and records-keeping capacity make obtaining official documentation much easier than work on the Rhee regime. The largest obstacle, however, to obtaining primary sources for both the 1950s and early 1960s is the stringent nature of South Korean privacy laws that prevent archival access for materials containing the personal information of living private citizens. Thus the project will require alternative methodologies and creative use of unofficial sources to historicize the changes to penal administration in this period.

VII. Chapter Outline

The first chapter of this dissertation will reevaluate the advent of the carceral form and practice on the Korean peninsula by reviewing the scholarship on penal modernization and suggesting a more thorough Foucauldian reading of carceral practices and governmentality during the Taehan Empire (1897-1910) and Japanese colonial period. This chapter identifies the local specificities of Korea’s penal modernization, highlighting autonomous Korean discourses of reform and changes in penal culture, and merge Korean penal history scholarship with debates on the emergence of modern governmentality prior to formal annexation. This chapter will locate trends in colonial period penal discourse to better understand continuities and ruptures in the post-Liberation penal system.

The second chapter analyzes the official discourse that reframed the prison as a necessary tool for public safety divorced from its colonial legacy. It seeks to answer the question of how southern Korean prisons went from nearly empty in the Fall of 1945, to overflowing by August of 1948. It combines analysis of U.S. military archival sources with local responses to flesh out the narrative of post-Liberation penal reform and its opposition. This chapter will complicate the narrative of a seamless transition from colonial to ROK penal practice by accounting for both U.S. and local officials’ repositioning of the role of punishment under occupation and (ostensibly) autonomous Korean rule. While the infrastructure and personnel were often the same, post-liberation authorities struggled to justify the prison as a necessary institution for public safety while emphasizing qualitative difference with colonial penal practice. Popular resistance to U.S. military rule complicated official narratives about criminality and social deviance by pitting the occupation against the very people it proposed to protect. Koreans’ fight for local autonomy and survival under mismanaged economic policy landed many in jail or prison, revealing the MG criminal justice system as the repressive tool of yet another occupier. The chapter will further examine official and public discourse surrounding the state of USAMGIK prisons in comparison to their Japanese predecessors, and center high-profile cases of abuse and prison breaks following the Autumn Harvest Uprising of 1946. It will utilize the abundant primary source material (testimonies) produced surrounding the October Taegu Uprising (1946) and Cheju Massacres (1948) to account for the role of the penal apparatus in suppressing rebellion and facilitating massacre.

The third chapter will explore penal reform and ideological indoctrination, analyzing the shifting official and public discourse surrounding criminality and punishment after the founding of the Republic of Korea in 1948. The establishment of a separate government in the south further solidified division of the peninsula and raised the status of social control of deviance to that of the Cold War containment of communism. Maintaining an archipelago of well-ordered prisons (and the disciplinary power they projected to the free population) were crucial to solidifying South Korea’s internal stability as a bulwark against the spread of communism in East Asia. This chapter focuses on the penal rhetoric of president Syngman Rhee, a problematic figure with his own history of incarceration and prison activism. As one of the first administrative measures of the new republic, the Rhee regime enacted mass pardons to release a significant portion of nonviolent offenders from prison, a thinly veiled measure to remedy prison overcrowding and reduce operational costs. The problematic pardons prompted a wholesale reevaluation of the parole system and South Korean society’s belief in rehabilitation penology at large. Any relief mass pardons provided for prison overcrowding was immediately erased with the expansion of categories of political crime after the passing of the National Security Law. This chapter traces changes in the discourse surrounding “ordinary” criminality alongside the First Republic’s resurgence of colonial era methods of ideological conversion (K: chŏnhyang; J: tenkō) in penal spaces and activities of the National Guidance League. It interrogates the historiographical division between “normal” and politicized penal practice with a case study where hegemonic anticommunist ideology came to influence every facet of governance and public discourse. Analysis of materials related to the activities of the National Guidance League will emphasize the shift to a Cold War penal paradigm after the passing of the National Security Law in 1948 and flesh out the relationship between early ROK penology and ideological indoctrination.

The fourth chapter will trace developments in ROK penology and penal administration through the rupture of the Korean War. It will examine the phenomenon of massacres of political and ordinary prisoners, exploring the role of ROK penal spaces and practices in the killing. Where the previous chapter explored the discourse and rationale of pardons, this chapter examines wartime massacre of prisoners as a reversal of disciplinary power, where the status of prisoners as social deviants and the ulterior motive of conversion programs were laid bare. Prior to the outbreak of the Korean War, prisoners undergoing anticommunist conversion were housed, fed, educated and socially assimilated. After North Korean forces invaded Seoul in June of 1950, tens of thousands of ideological offenders were massacred. This chapter explores the breakdown of penal administration and resort to retributive violence towards both political and ordinary prisoners in wartime crisis. Prisons were sites of both liberation and massacre as the KPA occupied portions of South Korea in 1950. This chapter will account for the use of southern prisons by North Korean authorities, isolating the prison as a site and technology of power readymade for use by shifting polities for varied political ends.

This chapter will further explicate the influence of U.S. and United Nations penological schema on the development of rehabilitation-based penology that was infused with wartime ideological indoctrination. The UN Command’s Civilian Information and Education Section oversaw an extensive program for the “reeducation” of North Korean and Chinese POWS as well as ROK CI’s through propaganda film screenings, assigned readings produced by the United States Information Service (USIS), group discussions, and other cultural activities in the POW camps of Kŏje Island. This chapter will weave analysis of materials related to POW and civilian internment to account for changes in pre- and post-war ROK penology across a period that has heretofore only registered as a rupture in the penal historical record.

The fifth chapter will focus on the post-Korean War reconstruction of the prison system and wholesale reframing of penal administration as a tool of “democratization” and development. Nearly all of South Korea’s prison facilities were destroyed in the war. The primary aim of this chapter is to chart the significant shift in the post-war (1953-60) ROK penal imaginary that refigured the prison as a site for rehabilitation and production of the ideal democratic citizen. Spurred by technological aid from the U.S. and U.N., ROK authorities embarked on a campaign to reconstruct existing prisons, build new state-of-the-art penal facilities, and reframed their guiding ideology as a project for “democratizing” penal administration (minju haenghyŏng). Rehabilitation through education and penal labor was reframed as a mission to prepare inmates to not only rejoin society, but contribute as model citizens in an emerging member state of the Cold War’s “Free World.” This chapter will explore how South Korean penality interacted with discourses of development, modernization, poverty, and overcoming “backwardness.” It will demonstrate how discourse on the prison and deviance reflected hegemonic discourses of gender and race in the Cold War 1950s. South Korean discourses of the democratic citizen, their duties, and the human itself were significantly impacted by encounters with U.N. aid organizations and the emerging “human rights” global discourse. This chapter asks how the Cold War environment and U.S. influence racialized notions of deviance and development through the lasting impact of wartime reeducation schema that emphasized a perceived East Asian difference in the capacity for reform and achievement of liberal democratic subjectivity. South Korean penologists responded to these encounters with Western penal regimes with an urgency to overcome the “backwardness” of their system and its material limitations.

The concluding chapter concerns changes in the ROK prison system after the April Revolution of 1960 (the popular uprising that overthrew the Syngman Rhee regime) and subsequent military coup in May of 1961. Prison spaces appear in historical narratives of the initial period of repression following the fraudulent election of March, 1960, but the role of prisons in this period is understudied. The military junta (1961-63) led by Gen. Park Chung Hee fundamentally reframed the mission of penal institutions under the euphemistic schema of “corrections” by renaming penal institutions kyodoso in December of 1961. South Korean penal culture still utilizes the language and guiding ideology of corrections developed in this era.

VIII. Research Plan

My archival work in South Korea, which will start in July 2019, will be supported by the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad fellowship. While in Korea I will be affiliated with Sungkyunkwan University’s Interuniversity Center for Korean Language Studies which will provide library access and other logistical assistance. I will also work closely with one faculty member at SKKU, Professor Oh Je-yeon who specializes in contemporary Korean history and student movements of the 1950s. With Fulbright funding I will spend eight months in Seoul accessing several state archives, including the National Assembly Library, the National Library System’s central library, and the National Archives of Korea. I will also search for materials held by the Ministry of Justice Correctional Service’s central headquarters, and also explore what is made publicly available by the remaining prison facilities and archival institutions in the provinces outside of Seoul. I have also met with the director of Seodaemun Prison History Hall, Dr. Pak Kyŏng-mok, and his curatorial staff will assist me in accessing their archival materials. They also have a network of former staff and inmates from the Park Chung Hee period who periodically speak about their experience, so I have obtained the necessary credentials from UCLA’s institutional review board of the Office of the Human Research Protection Program to conduct interviews. I will return to Los Angeles in March of 2020 and support the rest of my writing process with funding as a teaching assistant. I plan to make another research trip to NARA in Maryland, as well as other U.S. archives to further flesh out the U.S. influence on Korean penology. I will then apply for the Dissertation Year Fellowship (DYF), planning to use the rest of my departmental funding and finishing my dissertation to graduate in 2022.

Sample Bibliography

Primary Sources

Newspapers and Magazines

Chosŏn ilbo

Chungang ilbo

Hyŏngjŏng

Kyŏnghyang sinmun

Saegil

Tonga ilbo

Archival Sources

U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA II)

Record Group 554: Records of General HQ, Far East Command, Supreme Commander of Allied Powers and United Nations Command. USAFIK, XXIV Corps, G-2, Historical Section. “Records Regarding the Okinawa Campaign, U.S. Military Government in Korea, U.S.-U.S.S.R. Relations in Korea, and Korean Political Affairs. 1945-48.

---. Provost Marshall’s Section. Records Relating to Anticommunist Measures, Prisoners of War, and Troop Planning, 1950-51.

---. Provost Marshall’s Section. Prisoner of War Division, Correspondence Relating to Interned Korean Civilians.

RG 59 General Records of the Department of State. Central Decimal File, 1960-63. Box 2178. Country Law study for the Republic of Korea. JAG Section, HQ, Eighth U.S. Army.

“Appendix C: Reports on Korean Prisons,” Country Law study for the Republic of Korea. JAG Section, HQ, Eighth U.S. Army. 4/19/61. p. C1. NARA II, RG 59 General Records of the Department of State. Central Decimal File, 1960-63. Box 2178.

Hoover Institution Archives:

Haydon L. Boatner Papers

George F. Mott Papers

Other

American Advisory Staff, Department of Justice, USAMGIK, “Draft of Study on the Administration of Justice in Korea Under the Japanese and in South Korea Under the United States Army Military Government in Korea to 15 August 1948”

Ch’oe Se-hwang. Yŏngguk ŭi hyŏngjŏng chedo. Seoul: Ch’ihyŏng Hyŏphoe, 1954.

Gayn, Mark. Japan diary. William Sloane Associates, 1948.

Kwon, T’ae-gŭn. Haenghyŏnghak. Seoul: Kyujangsa, 1956.

Yoon, Paek-nam. Chosŏn Hyŏngjŏngsa. Seoul: Munyesŏrim, 1948.

Secondary Sources

Korean Language Sources

Ch’oe Chŏng-gi. Kamgŭm ŭi chŏngch’I. Seoul: Ch’aek Sesang, 2005.

---. Pijŏnhyang changgisu: 0.5 p’yŏng e kach’in hanbando. Seoul: Ch’aek Sesang, 2007.

---. “Haebang ihu Han’guk chŏnjaeng kkaji ŭi hyŏngmuso silt’ae yŏn’gu,” Chenosaidŭ (Genocide) Yon’gu, no. 2 (August 2007), 63-93.

Im, Chong-t’ae. Han’guk esŏ ŭi haksal: han’guk hyŏndaesa, kiŏk kwa ŭi t’ujaeng. Seoul: T’ong’il Nyusŭ, 2017.

Kang Hye-kyŏng, Che 1-konghwaguk ch'ogi kungmin t'ongje ŭi hwangnip. P'aju: Han'guk Haksul chŏngbo, 2005.

Kang Sŏng-hyŏn. “Kungmin podo yŏnmaeng, chŏnhyang esŏ kamsi, tongwŏn, kŭrigo haksal ro,” in Chugŏm ŭrossŏ nara rŭl chik'ija: 1950-nyŏndae, pan'gong, tongwŏn, kamsi ŭi sidae, edited by Kim Tŭkchung, et. al., 119-76. Seoul: Sŏnin, 2007.

---. “Han’guk chŏnchaeng chŏn chŏngch’ibŏm yangsan ‘pŏpgyeyŏl’ ŭi unyŏng kwa chŏngch’ipŏm insik ŭi pyŏnhwa,” in Chŏnchaeng sok ŭi tto tarŭn chŏnchaeng, edited by Sŏ Chung-sŏk et. al., 83-128. Sŏnin, 2011.

Kim Sam-ung, et. al. I Sŭng-man chipkwŏn'gi ŭi sŏdaemun hyŏngmŭso. Sŏdaemun hyŏngmuso yŏksagwan, 2012.

Lee Im-ha, “Han’guk chŏnjaenggi puyŏkcha ch’abyŏl,” in Chŏnjaeng sok ŭi tto tarŭn chŏnjaeng, edited by Sŏ Chung-sŏk et. al, 129-72. Seoul: Sŏnin, 2011.

Lee Jong-min, “1910-nyŏn tae kŭndae kamok ŭi toip yŏngu,” Chŏngsin Munhwa Yŏngu 22, no. 2 (Summer 1999).

---. “Cheguk ilbonŭi ‘mobŏm’ kamok: tok'yo - t'aibei – kyŏngsŏng ŭi kamok sarye rŭl chungshim ŭro,” Tongbang Hakchi 177 (2016): 271-309.

Pak Ch’an-sik, “Cheju 4.3 sakŏn kwanlyŏn haenghyŏng chalyo wa hyŏngmuso chaesoja Sŏdaemun, Map’o, Kwangju hyŏngmuso lŭl chungsim ŭlo,” Tamna Munhwa, Vo. 40, (2012): 251-315.

Pak I-jun “Migunjŏnggi chŏn'guk chuyo hyŏngmuso chiptan t'arok sagŏn yŏn'gu” Tamnon 201 9(4) (2006): 141-69.

Pak Kyŏng-mok, “Taehan cheguk malgi ilche ŭi kyŏngsŏng kamok sŏlch’i wa pon’gam/pun’gam che shihaeng,” Han’guk Kŭnhyŏngdaesa Yŏngu, no. 46 (Fall 2008): 81-104.

---. “1930 nyŏn dae Sŏdaemun Hyŏngmuso ŭi ilsang.” Han’guk Kŭnhyŏndaesa Yŏngu 66 (September 2013): 65-116.

Pŏmmubu Kyojŏng Bonbu, Taehan Min'guk kyojŏngsa, vol. 1. Paju: Pŏmmubu Kyojŏng Bonbu, 2010.

Sim, Chae-u. Chosŏn hugi kukka kwŏllyŏk kwa pŏmjoe t'ongje: ‘shimnirok’ yŏn'gu. T’aehaksa, 2009.

Song Kŏn-ho. Haebang chŏnhusa ŭi insik, vol. 1, revised edition. Seoul: Han’gilsa, 1989.

To Myŏn-hoe, Han’guk Kŭndae Hyŏngsa Chepan Chedo-sa. Seoul: P’ulŭn Yŏksa, 2014.

English Language Sources

Agamben, Giorgio. Homo sacer: Sovereign power and bare life. Stanford University Press, 1998.

Anderson, Clare. The Indian uprising of 1857-8: prisons, prisoners and rebellion. Anthem Press, 2007.

Botsman, Daniel V. Punishment and power in the making of modern Japan. Princeton University Press, 2013.

Bright, Charles. The Powers that Punish: Prison and Politics in the Era of the" Big House", 1920-1955. University of Michigan Press, 1996.

Burge, Russel. “The Prison and the Postcolony: Contested Memory and the Museumification of Sŏdaemun Hyŏngmuso,” Journal of Korean Studies, Volume 22, Number 1 (Spring 2017): 33-67.

Cumings, Bruce. The Origins of the Korean War, vol. 1. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1981.

Dikotter, Frank, and Frank Dikötter. Crime, punishment and the prison in modern China. Columbia University Press, 2002.

Dikötter, Frank. and Ian Brown. ed. Cultures of Confinement: A History of the Prison in Africa, Asia, and Latin America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007).

Dudden, Alexis. Japan's colonization of Korea: discourse and power. University of Hawaii Press, 2006.

Foucault, Michel. “Truth and Power,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings, 1972-1977, ed., trans. Colon Gordon, 109-33. New York: Vintage Books, 1980.

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#koreanhistory #korea #south korea #ROK #historiography #penal history #prison studies #penalhistory #incarceration #humancaging #human caging

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art-is-seduction · 7 years ago

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Indeed, Robert Adams, along with Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal, Art Sinsabaugh, and other New Topographics photographers, represented not the pristine western landscape of national parks’ propaganda and of the Hollywood Western1; rather, they focused on the “man-altered landscape” (Jenkins, 1975): tract houses seemingly constructed in the middle of nowhere; a drive-in movie screen silhouetted against Pike’s Peak and even blending in with the latter’s profile; roadways, road-kill, and burning oil sludges. New Topographics photography questioned the supposed distinction between cultural and natural landscapes. In doing so, the New Topographics photographers often formally refer to and ironize past images of “pristine” wilderness

such as those by nineteenth- century U.S. Geological Survey photographers Wm. Henry Jackson and Carlton Watkins from the earliest days of western expansion; as well as post-war images by West Coast landscape photographers Edward Weston and Ansel Adams of the f/64 group. New Topographics photography works powerfully—and with considerable irony—to question the validity of the centuries-old distinction between nature and culture in some of the West’s most mythologized imagery.

Yet despite the influence of New Topographics on subsequent generations of landscape photographers, little serious scholarship exists on their work. To date, the most significant and lengthy treatment of the New Topographics remains photographer and critic Deborah Bright’s 1985 essay, “Of Mother Nature and Marlboro Man” (1993). As part of a series of essays on the ideological constructions of landscape and the American West (1990, 1991), Bright’s 1985 essay positioned New Topographics within the vicissitudes of the art market. Querying “Why landscape now?” Bright observed that representations of landscape historically have served “an upper-crust cultivated taste for aestheticized nature” (1993, p. 127). She justifiably invoked the renaissance of the art market at the end of the 1970s—a commercial rebirth coming after nearly a decade of non-object oriented art movements critical of art’s institutionalization and corporate consumption, including performance, video, and conceptual art—as one context for the aesthetic consumability of the New Topographics landscape photographs.

Contextualizing the works within the conservative turn in American culture and politics in the 1980s, Bright also accused New Topographics photographers of occluding increasing corporate dominance over the “social and physical environment” under then- President Ronald Reagan. Ultimately, Bright indicted New Topographic photographers for failing to historicize their subject and for neglecting to articulate a clear social critique. Their status as mere “art objects” diminished any social concern the photographers might otherwise have intended.

Yet much of the western “expansion” pictured by the New Topographics photographs consists of mobile homes, impoverished former boomtowns, lower-middle- class housing tracts, and other signs of the lost American Dream still conventionally signified by the West. While far from overt or obvious, the images also neither sentimentalize “nature” nor simply condemn these interlopers on the Western landscape. Although I am indebted to Bright’s sustained social history of landscape photography, it does not adequately register the significant ironic dimension of New Topographics and the role of that irony in the historicizing of “postmodern” art and photography. This essay proposes to reconsider the function of irony in New Topographics photography in order to place the works within another dimension of their historical context. The photographs’ brief, non-descriptive titles, their sometimes serial installation, their clear lack of moral judgment, and the fact that many were initially published in the then-new phenomenon of photo books, all positioned these photographs not only within an art market, as Bright insists, but within a related art movement: that is, not just as art photography but as Conceptual photography.

New Topographics photographers such as Baltz, Robert Adams, Frank Gohlke, Joe Deal, and Stephen Shore, among others, acquired their name from a 1975 exhibition at the International Museum of Photography in Rochester, New Topographics, and subtitled, Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape. The exhibition’s title was clearly a nod to nineteenth-century topographic photography under the initial exploratory auspices of the U.S. Geological Survey, as well as an acknowledgment of the alteration of that terrain during the century intervening—an acknowledgement missing from mid- century photographs by Ansel Adams. An art book titled Landscape: Theory published by Lustrum Press in 1980, which included a number of the New Topographics photographers, helped cement their prominence. Guggenheim awards and the blessings of art photography doyen and Museum of Modern Art’s head photographic curator John Szarkowski secured the group’s place in the annals of art and landscape photography, as well as in the photography art market.

Yet virtually lost to this history of the New Topographics photography’s fine arts pedigree is the fact that the Rochester exhibition of the New Topographics photographers, curated by William Jenkins, specified a debt to the deadpan photographic series of Conceptual artist Edward Ruscha. To paraphrase curator Jenkins, it is not what Rucha’s photographs are of so much as it is what they are about (Jenkins, 1975, p.5). Though Ruscha’s photographs were of gas stations along Route 66 or of every building on the Sunset Strip, they were about a series of aesthetic issues: as photographer John Schott has asserted, “[Ruscha’s pictures] are not statements about the world through art, they are statements about art through the world” (cited in Jenkins, 1975, p.5).

Similarly, while New Topographic photographs appear to be of western landscapes, trees, deserts, houses, roads, and construction, they are nonetheless about the aesthetic discourse of landscape photography, and about “a man-made wilderness” (Ratliff, 1976, p.86): that is, they are about the American myths of the West, suburban expansion, the American dream, and the exploitation and destruction of natural resources. Although Bright observed that “[b]eauty, preservation, development, exploitation, regulation…are historical matters in flux, not essential conditions of landscape”; nonetheless, they are essential conditions of the cultural construction of “landscape”; conditions, as Bright would doubtless agree, serving specific political and even ideological ends.

VISUAL TROPES

While American western expansion in the 1870s was in part encouraged as a means to help unify North and South in the wake of the Civil War, western expansion after World War II was part of the newly-affluent, newly-mobile middleclass tourist experience. The “aesthetics” of this experience in photographs by Ansel Adams, as Bright observed, was “well suited to the conservative social climate of a post-World War II United States basking in its reborn Manifest Destiny as a world superpower” (Bright, 1993, p.129; 1990).2

Well-versed in this American landscape tradition from the U.S. Geological Survey photographs by William Henry Jackson and Carlton Watkins to the now-iconic post-war western landscapes of Ansel Adams, New Topographics photographers appropriated many of the formal compositional elements by which landscape photography—and even landscape painting before it—was known.

For example, the traditional horizontal, “landscape” format that takes its name from the genre and intended to imply the endless sweep of land beyond the picture’s frame, in many of the photographic canvases of Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz square, instead emphasizes the domestic containment of the land. Further, landscape’s traditional midline placement of the horizon for compositional balance between earth and sky is often repositioned by New Topographics photographers above or below midline, or is even absent, rendering the landscape cluttered, unbalanced, or constrained rather than pristine and endless. The use of foliage to frame a distant view, which early U.S.G.S. topographic photographers such as Carlton Watkins borrowed from eighteenth- century romantic landscape painting, as well as to give a sense of scale; is rendered by Robert Adams in On Signal Hill overlooking Long Beach, California (1983) as pathos— the tree in the foreground is not only dwarfed by the enormous sprawl of the city behind it, but it also acts as a lone and pathetic reminder of what has been displaced by urban development.

Other recognizable landscape photography conceits utilized by Ansel Adams and Edward Weston included a point of view chosen to occlude any presence of humans, including the photographer himself, in order to maintain the fantasy of a wilderness untouched by man. By contrast, in Robert Adams’s On Lookout Mountain, next to Buffalo Bill’s grave, Jefferson County, Colorado (1970), for example, the photographer’s perspective from far-flung cliffs includes graffiti, demonstrating that there are few places, regardless how remote, where humans have not been or not marked by their presence. Visual tropes of nature, such as landscape photography’s inclusion of bodies of water for mirrored symmetry, fertility, and preternatural calm are all fodder for compositional parody by the New Topographics. Instead, man-made roads, tunnels, and byways break up the land rather than superimpose symmetry upon the view of the land; and mysterious, natural phenomena, such as steam rising from the sulphur springs that first fascinated the U.S. Geological Survey photographers such as W. H. Jackson in 1875 is, in Lewis Baltz’s Sunflower Condominiums During Construction, Looking West (1978), not steam from a mysterious, preternatural source, but the dust from new construction. Note, too, that whereas photograph titles used by the U.S.G.S. that incorporate cardinal direction (“looking west”) ostensibly for orientation nonetheless managed to instill “west” as a distinctly American concept; the New Topographics photographer’s similar use of topographic titling laconically acknowledges cardinal orientation as the contemporary developer’s dream of open, profitable land.

Indeed, such specific and even famous photographs as Ansel Adams’s Moonrise over Hernandez, New Mexico (1944) are invoked by Robert Adams’s Fort Collins, Colorado(1976) some 30 years later in order to show us suburban habitation illuminated by that same moon—a parking lot that holds surrounding undeveloped land at bay while importing a small, cordoned bit of nature within itself for decorative and humanistic purposes. Robert Adams’s photograph even slyly suggests that the moon is the source for what in fact turns out to be artificial illumination by a nearby streetlamp.

The irony of these photographs, as Jenkins suggests of Ruscha, is that they are of landscape but about the discursive construction of landscape and the literal destruction of the land, a kind of irony that is part of the modus operandi of conceptual art. Though irony has been considered at length in literary studies—as a trope, a device, and a mode—it has generated little more than passing commentary in art history and criticism.3 Irony remains Conceptual art’s primary legacy for contemporary art and photography, yet the phenomenon is little understood by the scholars and critics who acknowledge its appearance in art since the Vietnam War.

ROMANTIC OR POSTMODERN IRONY?

I would venture to say here that it is the work’s irony that both frustrates Bright’s own social agenda—as it did many critics in the 1980s—and is the defining characteristic New Topographics photography. I would further argue that it is the irony itself that, in New Topographics photography, expands what Bright characterizes as landscape photography’s “narrow, self-reflexive project,” though it does so in a more opaque fashion than perhaps she would prefer. Bright’s reluctance to acknowledge the work of irony in New Topographic landscapes is symptomatic of art and culture of the United States from the 1980s onward.

For the culture of the United States is one that does not much care for irony or ethical ambiguity. Photography, despite more than a century’s evidence of easy manipulation, nonetheless remains a medium from which we expect transparency. We are, perhaps, never more frustrated than when the photograph fails to tell us what it means or is about something other than what it is a picture of. I would argue that the ethical ambiguity of these works critiques us more than Bright acknowledges: Robert Adams’s cropping of the word “Frontier” on his photograph of a Colorado gas station (“Frontier” gas station and Pikes Peak, Colorado Springs, Colorado, 1969) forces us to complete the word that might otherwise have been so obvious as to be overlooked. In so doing, we have the opportunity to acknowledge that we have always been complicit both in the frontier myth of the West and in its destruction. Thus, as the late Craig Owens asserted, irony “is a negative trope calculated to expose false consciousness” (Owens, 1992, p.149).

Photographs by New Topographics photographers indisputably romanticize their subject, for all that they reflect the depredations of the landscape. As a Westerner who grew up during the period chronicled by the New Topographics, and in daily contact with the vestiges of the West’s unfulfilled American Dream pictured by them, I admittedly want to defend these photographs against what is, in part, the detached Easterner’s pointed and justifiably impassioned social criticism. The New Topographics’ coupling of nascent cynicism with formal aesthetics “risks,” as Charles Hagen observed in a review of Baltz’s work, “lapsing into a weary disgust that, in a perverse transformation, could almost become acceptance—the limpid Western light, which in many ways has always been Baltz’s real subject, gilds equally junk and land, detritus and sky. But Baltz’s spare formal vocabulary keeps the pictures from sinking into sentimentality” (Hagen, 1989). Indeed, the laconic irony of many of the photographs preserves their romanticism—the era from which, after all, modern irony stemmed—while reminding us of the true definition of nostalgia—to long for a version of the past that never truly existed.

Moreover, does the New Topographics photographers’ “failure” to judge for us in the photographs relieve us of that responsibility?4 Might not the ethical ambiguity of the works themselves function as a critical tool, as many have argued about Conceptual and postmodern art, and thus more firmly implicate us in their critique of ideology? My interest in the New Topographics is part of an ongoing interest in the fate of ideology critique itself under post-industrial capitalism’s rampant and pervasive commodification of it. Indeed, given the increasing omnipresence and vacuity of form under our corporate culture industry, much of postmodern art, like the post-structuralist critique to which it is often linked, takes form and formal issues as its point of entry.5 My own interest in the New Topographics, some 20 years after Bright’s essay, anticipates, perhaps, the possibility of a larger renewed interest signaled by the 2005 acquisition of Robert Adams’s photographic oeuvre by Yale University, as well as the popularity of “new” naturalist writing by authors such as Barbara Kingsolver (2001) and Michael Pollan (1991, 2002), and an increase in art historical scholarship on previously overlooked artists and movements from the sixties and seventies (Kwon, 2004; Lee, 2006, 2001; Molesworth, 2003). Indeed, whereas Ansel Adams’s work remains a popular subject for coffee table books and an adornment of Sierra Club wall and engagement calendars, few today outside the art world and cultural élite are familiar with New Topographics.

The false consciousness exposed by the New Topographics’ irony is that the West was ever pristine, ever uninhabited: Even the nineteenth-century photographer, to get his view, left footprints (Banham, 1987, p.5). The false consciousness exposed by the New Topographic’s irony is, perhaps, that these photographs are less about the “man-altered landscape” than what California cultural and architectural historian Reyner Banham called the “man-mauled desert” (1987, p.2). The photographs are often beautiful not only because of the photographer’s eye, although Szarkowsky and others would have us believe this the whole story, but because we can be moved by such naked juxtapositions of human exploitation and the beauty of the constructed landscape—all we have ever truly known of nature despite a century’s worth of landscape photographs that have attempted to convince us otherwise. Indeed, as Banham further suggests, the “irony is that this beauty is itself a product of careless human ambition” (1987, pp.4-5).

Kelly Dennis teaches modern and contemporary art history and photography at the University of Connecticut. ESSAYS

#new topographics #photography #essays #Robert Adams #Lewis Baltz #ASX

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